Does Content Query Webpart make the server become slow? - sharepoint

In my new project, I have used a lot of Content Query Webparts (CQWP) and then I found that the site was becoming slower and slower when visited with the increasing number of CQWPs.The question I want to ask is:
Does a CQWP take a lot of server resources that make the site slow for visitors?
If I want to query the lists and customize the style of output then can I do it without a CQWP?

Take a look at this link may be you have to use custom XSLT with function to filter the output of CQWP.
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/extending-content-query-web-part-xslt-custom-functions/

For your first question
My answer is : It depends on the several things not only on the number of CQWP on the page.
Let me explain :
The CQWP has so many things to do like fetching data from the List which may be Sharepoint list or custom list ,the resource utilization depends on the logic applied to fetch the data from the list , by saying this I mean the amount of data to be fetched and the Logic complexity to get that data also make sense for the server resource utilization..
For example, If you have class which perform complex logic to get the data like comaprision , if else condition and ForEach Loops and the amount of data avaliable in list is large then it is obvious that it will take more resources from the server.
I hope you get my point
For Second question
My Answer is : You can use CQWp or DVWP(Data View Web Part), but be sure when to use which one.
To get more Idea about both of this take a look at this link
http://www.sharepointblog.co.uk/2012/06/data-view-web-part-vs-content-query-web-part/

Related

Filtering SharePoint List by Another SharePoint List

I posted this question on Stack Exchange here: (https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/249418/filtering-sharepoint-list-by-another-sharepoint-list), but just realized I should have posted it to Stack Overflow instead. Hope it's not bad form to cross-post (I'll add a link to this post in the other post).
I've been searching the forums and doing research online with no luck- apologies if this has been answered before.
I have a list with several thousand items in it. I often receive bulk update requests where I need to update several hundred of these items at a time (let's say for this example that we're using a field called "Case ID").
Here's what I've tried:
Searching cases individually, or up to three at a time in datasheet view; this is not time effective
Exporting the list and manually manipulating the data in Excel, then pasting in (and writing over) the data in the column that needs to be updated; this approach is not user friendly, is not necessarily time effective, and has potential side effects (causing errors for users currently modifying items that I am changing in bulk)
Lastly- I know I can create custom views that isolate this data; the problem is that the lists of cases I need to modify generally do not have enough commonalities to isolate them using the view filter logic
So- my guess is that I need two lists, likely connected with a web part. The first list would exist solely for the purpose of querying the second list. I would enter the Case IDs I wanted to filter by in the first list, and the second list would filter to show only the Case IDs in the first list. All items would be deleted from the first list between queries.
I'm not married to this approach- it's just my best guess. I'm open to creative and alternative approached, but the final process needs to be user friendly (business partners will be using it).
Does anyone know how I can accomplish this? I've tried to get something implemented several times over the past few years and have never been successful; posting here is my last resort before I throw in the towel.
I have SP 2013, and have SharePoint Designer; please let me know if I need to add any other information.
Thanks in advance for the support,
Chad
I'd suggest to create a JSOM application that will do all updates. It can query only items for update and do item-by-item update.

Shaping API endpoints and response

Hello Stackoverflow,
I'm writing API's for quite a bit of time right now and now it came to work with one of these bigger api's. Started wondering how to shape this API, as many times I've seen on a bigger platforms that one big entity (for example product page in shop) is loaded separately (We can see that item body loaded, but comments are still fetching etc.).
Usually what I've done was attaching comments as a relation in SQL query, so my frontend queried single API Endpoint like:
http://api.example.com/items/:id
And it returned all necessary data like seller info, photos etc.
Logically seller info and photos are small pieces of data (Item can only have 1 seller and no more than 10 photos for example), but number of comments might be way larger collection with relationship (comment author).
Does it make sense to separate one endpoint into 2 independent endpoints like:
http://api.example.com/items/:id
http://api.example.com/items/:id/comments
What are downsides of this approach? Is it common practice? Or maybe I misunderstood some concept?
One downside might be 2 request performed, but on the other hand, first endpoint should return data faster (as it's lighter than fetching n of comments), so page might be displayed faster and display spinner for comments section. This way I'll be able to paginate comments too.
Are there any improvements that might be included in this separation of endpoints? Or maybe I'm totally wrong and it should be done totally different way?
I think it is a good approach if:
The number of comments of one item can be large, because with this approach you could paginate it easier.
If you are going to need to access to the comments of one item without needing rest of item information
I think any of the previous conditions justify this decition, and yes, it is common approach.

SharePoint loading time optimization and caching

We have this page in SharePoint that list all the sites, the person who manages that site, their contact info, and the last modified date.
Currently, we are using a custom webpart that crawls through the sites and reads through the metadata, and then it displays all these in a list.
Opening this page takes about 10+ seconds.
We're looking at ways to cut this time to less than 3 seconds.
I'm thinking about some sort of timer job that caches the page, say every half hour, and when the page is requested, simply display the cached version. The data in the page itself doesn't change that often so caching isn't really a big issue. Is this idea feasible? I'm fairly new in SharePoint so what would be the steps to implement this?
Or if there are any other options/suggestions on how to reduce the load time, I'm all ears.
here are some approaches that might work for you.
Extend your existing Webpart with a cache. So the first User who visit the Site will wait as long as with the existing Solution. But he will fill the cache, so every other call of the Site will be much faster
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webpartpages.webpart.partcachewrite(v=office.15).aspx
Create a Timer-Job that fill up da extra SharePoint- List with the fields you need. So you render your Webpart using this data. To fetch the needed data from the List will be much faster than iterating some SPWeb or SPSite Objects.
A lot of data already can be fetched from the Search-Service, and you can extend the Attributes the search engine will crawl. Once the search attributes are extended you can create a search driven Webpart
http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/jj679900(v=office.15).aspx
Each of this Solutions should work at SP 2007/10/13
If you need a quick-win than mybee Solution 1 is the best for you.
Regards

standard way of encoding pagination info on a restful url get?

I think my question would be better explained with a couple of examples...
GET http://myservice/myresource/?name=xxx&country=xxxx&_page=3&_page_len=10&_order=name asc
that is, on the one hand I have conditions ( name=xxx&country=xxxx ) and on the other hand I have parameters affecting the query ( _page=3&_page_len=10&_order=name asc )
now, I though about using some special prefix ( "_" in thes case ) to avoid collisions between conditions and parameters ( what if my resourse has an "order" property? )
is there some standard way to handle these situations?
--
I found this example (just to pick one)
http://www.peej.co.uk/articles/restfully-delicious.html
GET http://del.icio.us/api/peej/bookmarks/?tag=mytag&dt=2009-05-30&start=1&end=2
but in this case condition fields are already defined (there is no start nor end property)
I'm looking for some general solution...
--
edit, a more detailed example to clarify
Each item is completely indepent from one another... let's say that my resources are customers, and that (luckily) I have a couple millions of them in my db.
so the url could be something like
http://myservice/customers/?country=argentina,last_operation=2009-01-01..2010-01-01
It should give me all the customers from argentina that bought anything in the last year
Now I'd like to use this service to build a browse page, or to fill a combo with ajax, for example, so the idea was to add some metada to control what info should I get
to build the browse page I would add
http://...,_page=1,_page_len=10,_order=state,name
and to fill an autosuggest combo with ajax
http://...,_page=1,_page_len=100,_order=state,name,name=what_ever_type_the_user*
to fill the combo with the first 100 customers matching what the user typed...
my question was if there was some standard (written or not) way of encoding this kind of stuff in a restfull url manner...
While there is no standard, Web API Design (by Apigee) is a great book of advice when creating Web APIs. I treat it as a sort of standard, and follow its recommendations whenever I can.
Under "Pagination and partial response" they suggest (page 17):
Use limit and offset
We recommend limit and offset. It is more common, well understood in leading databases, and easy for developers.
/dogs?limit=25&offset=50
There's no standard or convention which defines a way to do this, but using underscores (one or two) to denote meta-info isn't a bad idea. This is what's used to specify member variables by convention in some languages.
Note:
I started writing this as a comment to my previous answer. Then I was going to add it as an edit, but I think that it belongs as a separate answer instead. This is a completely different approach and a separate answer in its own right since it is a different approach.
The more that I have been thinking about this, I think that you really have two different resources that you have to deal with:
A page of resources
Each resource that is collected into the page
I may have missed something (could be... I've been guilty of misinterpretation). Since a page is a resource in its own right, the paging meta-information is really an attribute of the resource so placing it in the URL isn't necessarily the wrong approach. If you consider what can be cached downstream for a page and/or referred to as a resource in the future, the resource is defined by the paging attributes and the query parameters so they should both be in the URL. To continue with my entirely too lengthy response, the page resource would be something like:
http://.../myresource/page-10/3?name=xxx&country=yyy&order=name&orderby=asc
I think that this gets to the core of your original question. If the page itself is a resource, then the URI should describe the page so something like page-10 is my way of saying "a page of 10 items" and the next portion of the page is the page number. The query portion contains the filter.
The other resource names each item that the page contains. How the items are identified should be controlled by what the resources are. I think that a key question is whether the result resources stand on their own or not. How you represent the item resources differs based on this concept.
If the item representations are only appropriate when in the context of the page, then it might be appropriate to include the representation inline. If you do this, then identify them individually and make sure that you can retrieve them using either URI fragment syntax or an additional path element. It seems that the following URLs should result in the fifth item on the third page of ten items:
http://.../myresource/page-10/3?...#5
http://.../myresource/page-10/3/5?...
The largest factor in deciding between these two is how strongly coupled the individual item is with the page. The fragment syntax is considerably more binding than the path element IMHO.
Now, if the item resources are free-standing and the page is simply the result of a query (which I think is likely the case here), then the page resource should be an ordered list of URLs for each item resource. The item resource should be independent of the page resource in this case. You might want to use a URI that is based on the identifying attribute of the item itself. So you might end up with something like:
http://.../myresource/item/42
http://.../myresource/item/307E8599-AD9B-4B32-8612-F8EAF754DFDB
The key deciding factor is whether the items are freestanding resources or not. If they are not, then they are derived from the page URI. If they are freestanding, then they should have their are defined by their own resources and should be included in the page resource as links instead.
I know that the RESTful folk tend to dislike the usage of HTTP headers, but has anyone actually looked into using the HTTP ranges to solve pagination. I wrote a ISAPI extension a few years back that included pagination information along with other non-property information in the URI and I never really like the feel of it. I was thinking about doing something like:
GET http://...?name=xxx&country=xxxx&_orderby=name&_order=asc HTTP/1.1
Range: pageditems=20-29
...
This puts the result set parameters (e.g., _orderby and _order) in the URI and the selection as a Range header. I have a feeling that most HTTP implementations would screw this up though especially since support for non-byte ranges is a MAY in RFC2616. I started thinking more seriously about this after doing a bunch of work with RTSP. The Range header in RTSP is a nice example of extending ranges to handle time as well as bytes.
I guess another way of handling this is to make a separate request for each item on the page as an individual resource in its own right. If your representation allows for this, then you might want to consider it. It is more likely that intermediate caching would work very well with this approach. So your resources would be defined as:
myresource/name=xxx;country=xxx/orderby=name;order=asc/20/
myresource/name=xxx;country=xxx/orderby=name;order=asc/21/
myresource/name=xxx;country=xxx/orderby=name;order=asc/22/
myresource/name=xxx;country=xxx/orderby=name;order=asc/23/
myresource/name=xxx;country=xxx/orderby=name;order=asc/24/
I'm not sure if anyone has tried something like this or not. This would make URIs constructible which is always a useful property IMHO. The bonus to this approach is that the individual responses could be cached and the server is free to optimize handling of collecting pages of items and what not in the most efficient way. The basic idea is to have the client specify the query in the URI and the index of them item that it wants to retrieve. No need to push the idea of a "page" into the resource or even to make it visible. The client can iteratively retrieve objects until it's page is full or it receives a 404.
There is a downside of course... the HTTP server and infrastructure has to support pipelining or the cost of creation/destruction of connections might kill the idea outright.

SharePoint 2007 Banner Hit Counter

In the SharePoint publishing site I will have some banners that are Web Parts and can have any HTML content inside them. I have requirement to count clicks on that banners. Banners will have some links to external sites.
I am not sure where to store counters for individual banners. Custom List is the first thing that came to my mind but I am not sure how will it behave in concurrent access. Can I lock list (list item) and do the counter increment ? What will happen for other list access if it is in lock state ? Will it fail or just wait ?
Are there any alternatives to storing counters somewhere else ?
There are lots of places, here are the two most popular:
Property Bag (most likely on the Web) which is a number you increment
Inside a list
Of these, I have successfully done it with a list on our blogging solution, you can see it here: http://community.zevenseas.com/blogs, where I'm tracking views for each post. I took this approach because I like to see more than a number, eg. referrer, ip, etc.
Things to keep in mind:
You need to keep a close eye on the number of items you are storing. SharePoint doesn't like lots of items in a list. To manage them put them in folders, a folder for each banner, and then subfolders for each month.
I would keep a list with each of the banners (just their name or more) in it, then create a second list to store the views. In the list where you store the views have a lookup back to the list storing the banners. On the original banner list you can then create a new column which "Counts" the number of Views related to each banner item.
Again, be very careful about the number of items you are expecting, but this works pretty nicely for us.
Don't forget a small database will allow you to store page hits against whatever you want. You can then call a stored proc and that database "just takes care of it". You don't have to worry about access and concurrency (because you used a transaction riiiight!).
A SharePoint list is easy because they are there out of the box, but consider that they have a lot of overhead for adding values and even reading from. They are also editable by a site administrator, which may be find, depending on the number of administrators you have. A list is easier to provision than a new database, so in the end you do need to consider the two options carefully.
Just because SharePoint has a hammer does not mean everything is a nail :)

Resources