I understand the pros of using namespaces within the actual application layers but when it comes to the front tier, I am not so sure.
My project is a Website (not WebApplication) and I get all sorts of problems (missing references, for one) when I try and include "namespaced" user controls. Despite explicit declarations in web.config under system.web - pages - controls - add.
When it comes to the actual views, the webforms: when you create a new page, Visual Studio creates the codebehind classname from the path where you chose to create the file. So most times, I'd say that class names will be unique. If you move around pages, then it will become strange to see say Start_DefaultPage but under another sub folder.
To summarize: Is it recommended to put namespaces into the web tier? What are the pros and cons?
Yes. In the future, you may decide to include external libraries that (coincidentally) use the same class names, and you do not want to have a namespace collision, as you very well know can occur. In addition, you may have web applications in a virtual directory that will inherit the properties outlined in the parent web.config. You do not want to mess with namespace conflicts there, either. Generally speaking, it is just a good programming practice.
Your problem is that you are using a web site "project". Stop doing that, and you'll stop having these problems.
Web Sites are a mistake that Microsoft made. There's no need for you to make their mistake into your mistake.
Related
I am authoring an installer that creates a new website and application pool. This installer is for internal use within several development environments which all have subtle differences. One may use only HTTP, another only HTTPS and one might use both. One might use the default ApplicationPoolIdentity identity where as another may use an explicit User reference.
Given the association of a WebAppPool is by ID through a WebApplication which must be nested under a WebSite, each time an option is desired on the installer, the breakout and duplication of features gets ridiculous.
I imagine I am not the first to encounter this, how does one accomplish this much flexibility within an installer?
The route I went with was creating a basic template within WIX using expected IDs, then used an immediate custom action scheduled before InstallValidate which manipulated the template entries to what ever degree was required. The properties used by the CA to make the decisions are stored in the registry for modify/patch/removal invocations.
I am very new to liferay 7 ,actually we are migrating liferay 6.2 to liferay-7 ,in the 6.2 we are using ext to override the action class but in the liferay-7 I am getting some cofusion,could you please help me out.
The main theme of my ext is : whenever a new role getting created in an organization from the control panel, we need to store the role information and organization information in our custom table for that we have overriden EditRoleAction.java in LR6.2 so same thing we are trying to achieve in LR7.
Action class in Liferay 6.2 :
Portal path :
D:\Liferay6.2workspace\portal\portal-impl\src\com\liferay\portlet\rolesadmin\action\EditRoleAction.java
Ext Path:
CutomRoles-ext/docroot/WEB-INF/ext-impl/src/com/liferay/portlet/rolesadmin/action/EditRoleAction.java
Action class in Liferay 7.0GA4 :
D:\Liferay7GA4\portal\modules\apps\foundation\roles\roles-admin-web\src\main\java\com\liferay\roles\admin\web\internal\portlet*RolesAdminPortlet.java*
It really sounds like overriding the Action is not the right place to go. Look up ServiceWrappers - these will run on the business layer, and you can add additional code to (from memory) RoleLocalService.addRole(...) and other related methods.
Ext was never necessary for this purpose and shouldn't have been used in the first place. In fact, with the use of ext you deliberately make maintenance and upgrades a lot harder than when you go the regular plugin route. And with Liferay 7 and DXP the use of ext should be the extremely rare absolute exception to the rule. In fact, it's just now being reintroduced after being absent so far (because in a few rare exceptional cases it's still the only way). However, it's safe to assume that you don't need it.
Now that the description in the comments to this answer goes much further than the description in the question: You might need some portlet-level customizations as well. For this: Identify where the portlet is currently implemented (e.g. identify the module) and override its actions (there's a good chance that this article can help) and potentially also the UI.
And yet another alternative: You might be able to achieve the same by using Teams in the organization's site: They behave almost like roles but are only available to a single site (no organization though, but you state that your organizations have sites anyway)
My customer wants to provide 2 themes for a SharePoint application. Is there a strategy to accomplish this in MOSS 2007?
We want to apply user profile-based theme selection, and maybe even a drop-down to switch modes.
I don't know how extensive you want your re-theming to be. However if it could be CSS-only you could use this approach:
Store the CSS files for the different themes in the Style Library.
Create a list that stores the user and their chosen theme.
Write a feature and custom application page to allow the user to change their theme.
Write a control that does a lookup on the list against the current user and obtains the a reference to the corresponding CSS file in the Style Library. The control would then output the CssRegistration and CssLink controls to the page for this file.
Add this control to the master page so it executes on every page (caching should be added).
I can't see why this wouldn't be supportable by Microsoft as you're only changing CSS.
If you need to do more than that then another option is to write an HTTP module that changes the HTML output. Or of course JavaScript. With these two options you may have supportability issues (it depends on how extensive your changes are).
There is also SPThemes now available on Codeplex from Bjørn Furuknap. Users can choose their own themes and they can be applied at different scopes.
Here are the options that I’ve come up with from research and feedback. Both of which seem mostly infeasible.
Implement major UI layout changes in JavaScript. This would lead to client slowdowns, would be difficult to code, and would be completely unsupported by Microsoft due to the need to reference SharePoint objects that may change with subsequent SharePoint patches.
Provide two parallel themed sites based on the same data, and provide a way to switch between them. This would require that we deploy each site to multiple locations, and would require retooling of any site creation mechanisms in code (since they'd need to target two sites instead of one).
One another thing you can try is to use the Theme Changer and ThemeChangerStaple from codeplex , That is implemented as feature you can use the same code logic to archive what you want with bit of modification, give it as an option for the user using CustomAction.
So, maybe I'm a bit old-school, but when we created websites in the past, we'd develop the site on a development server, then publish or promote the pages and files to the production server. This has always seemed to be a good way to go so that users didn't see messed up pages or (God forbid) a downed server because one of us screwed up.
But it doesn't seem that Microsoft had this idea in mind when they created SharePoint...at least, I haven't been able to find a way to do this in the infrastructure as it's defined.
Does anyone know if there's a management strategy for SharePoint development? I've read online that we can make a backup of the development environment and restore to the production server. That might work the first time, but any updates to the production server can't do that without risking data loss on the production server. I've seen some tools out there for migrating list contents, pages and documents from one server to another--although, admittedly, I've not yet investigated them.
But, another concern of mine is custom content types. It seems that once a list is using a content type, you can't update it without deleting the items from the list, disassociating the content type, and reassociating the content type. Shouldn't there be some way to UPGRADE a content type?
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for any of these current dilemas, I would LOVE to hear from you.
Thanks in advance,
Dan
Thank you for your quick reply.
We already have several features created for our site and a solution package bundling features directed at the fundamentals (content types, columns, etc), and another solution for features having to do with branding (page layouts, master pages, etc.)
But it seems like this is a one-time-shot...basically, it gets our server set up, right? Once people have started using the production environment, we're going to have documents, pages, list items all existing in our content database, and it'll be impossible to update things like content types, columns.
Features you have to deactivate and uninstall before you can install and activate the new feature, right? I've seen a Version property on the feature definition, but as near as I can tell, this doesn't do anything. Solutions seem like they can be upgrade by incrementing the version number, but it doesn't seem to modify things like content types and columns--especially if they're in use. Plus, I'm not sure how extensive the upgrade with solutions is.
There's precious-little documentation out there for this sort of thing. It seems like everything I'm reading is how to get your SharePoint server set up initially...not managing it long term.
Do you have any advice or suggestions?
Thank you all for your suggestions.
But we've been working on this site for over a year now. I'm pretty confident that we're already setup according to what most of you are recommending. We already have several features that install things like content types, columns, master pages, page layouts, and workflows. Most of these features are contained within solution packages. We have all of our development environments set up as VPC servers.
So, I have the initial deployment pretty much set. What I'm REALLY hoping to find out is how I can upgrade things like content types and columns and stuff down the road. Is it possible to change content types once they're in use? Because it doesn't seem, based on my initial testing, that this is possible. I'm not to worried about the assemblies because it looks like they swap out just fine, but the only way I've gotten a content type updated is by deleting any items referencing them (i.e. all the pages in my pages library), removing the content type, then re-adding it.
Do any of you know if there's a way to update a content type AFTER the initial deployment? ...when users have already created items based on the content types we've already deployed?
(The other part of my question was actually moving existing pages from the development server to production, but I can live without that. My major worry is the content types.)
The best way to go is developing with features. Once the features are done, you ca deploy them with Solution package (called WSP).
The only thing left to do is to reactivate those features. That way, you can progressively roll-out new features without having to do everything in production.
WSPBuilder is an application that helps you build WSP.
For automating all of this... good luck. There is a lot of work involved.
UPDATE:
Deploying Content Types and Columns are tricky. Once the website has been created, you can't update them anymore through features. You need to go through the code and recursively go through all the sites and modify the specific content type that match the name.
We've tried and it's not possible to do that normally with features. This need to go through something I call "deploying with code".
You really really need to define your content types using a feature because that way each content type will have a set GUID and will be stored in the database using the same name. This becomes important when running CAML queries over the site and there are a few other little gotchas when content types are created "will nilly" if you will.
I prefer STSDev for rolling out solutions using custom content types.
There are two ways to edit pages on the server. You can define the page library to have major and minor versions. This allows editors to edit the page and a defined publisher to publish them. This is good on an internal site, but is not recommended for a public facing site.
For a public facing site you will need to use Content Deployment
I cannot stress enough that before going ahead with a production release you make sure you have features for the content types.
As mentioned here, Chris O'Brian has a post saying that you should not use features unless necessary. One of his reasons is that it slows developement.
I disagree with this. Developement is slower if you are unfamiliar with features, but once a level of knowledge is reached, it is not a major factor.
Do listen to him about the backup and restore method of moving the content.
If you do that, all mess in the content types and fields and webs you may have created during developement (for me that is always quite a bit) will be moved to your production site.
Instead of having a nice clean site where everything is consistent, you will end up with little bugs and some areas of the site behaving differently to others simply because of old development cruft.
I recommend taking a look at Chris O'Briens most recent post, and his great Content Deployment Wizard: it's not all about Features!
Maxim is right in that most items should be deployed via features that are wrapped in solutions (WSP files). Your strategy should be to make sure your solutions and assemblies are broken into related bits of functionality. This is also beneficial in that features can be isolated at certain levels like sites and webs. Feature activation code, deactivation code and feature stapling should be used when updating any content updates. Content deployment can also make sense.
Once thing to remember is that if the updates are only in code then the assemblies can be updated without requiring the feature to be reactivated or the solution retracted and redeployed. All that is required is the Application Pool to be reset.
Microsoft has a couple articles on Dev environments and you can Google many others who recommend environments. We do development on virtual machines and deploy most items to an virtual integration server. Once we smoke test it we then deploy our solutions to QA so on and so forth. The benefit i sthat features and solutions are easy to retract. Once it goes out to production it should be thouroughly tested.
Developing in SharePoint has it's issues, that goes without saying, but so far I have found that the benefits outweight the problems.
Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
We developed a custom solution which would update content types and fields for a Site Collection. Underneath the covers, through code, SharePoint allows us to modify the Fields as well as values in the Fields and Site/List Content types.
For moving the actual content from QA to Prod we use Echo
I am total beginner in SharePoint and I need some help in starting a project. I have to develop publishing site that will be delivered to the client. I would like to give client deployment experience like he would get when deploying standard ASP.NET application as much as possible. I plan to use Visual Studio 2008 with SharePoint extensions and maybe WSPBuilder or some other tools.
I also need help in structuring whole project.
Here is what I plan to do:
1. Develop minimal site definition
2. Create site from this defionition. How should I do this from code ? Use SharePoint Feature ? How should I activate it ?
3. Develop all the needed infrastructure for the site (master page, layouts, content types, ...) as SharePoint Features.
Is this correct and how should I develop all those parts so I can make a some kind install script so can client create get complete site with one click ?
Site definitions are complex no question about it, but they are very useful if you need to deploy to unrelated enviornments. If you are staying on the same server farm, maybe site definition is overkill. If you are going between domains (i.e. test & prod, then maybe they are worth looking into).
Another advantage to site definitions, esp. if delivering to a client is it feels more like a traditional deliverable. They will have a bunch of files (hopefully in source control) that are their custom site. I think that gives IT dept's a much warmer feeling than an XML file created from the SharePoint UI.
Another benefit of site definitions are you have a lot more control over the pages that make up the site. IMHO its easier to add master pages & custom CSS via site defintion that site template.
I am curious as to what are the 'moving parts' to the site you are trying to deliver? I think that answering that question will determine how to define the project's structure.
Generally, I think you are on the right track. Features and solutions are a must. I would stay away from VSeWSS, its buggy and clunky and generally terrible if you are trying to do anything complex. It tries to be so smart, that it leaves you no control.
That said, it really depends on what you are trying to do. If you are going to build a solution to deploy to the GAC with one assembly, and only building features supported by vsewss you may be fine.
If however, you want to develop, say a timer job wiring that into the VSeWSS feature framework gets tough. Also, if you need multiple assemblies in the solution. YMMV, but I had to junk it and find of a more flexible solution (hello NANT).
A lot of the work you will end up doing is building and checking, and re-checking XML configuration files. Bookmark the Feature Schema reference page on MSDN, you will be spending a lot of time going through it.
Finally, yes, if you have all of the parts packaged as features you should be able to develop a nice install script. Ultimately the script will need to call the STSADM (there are some really nice STSADM extensions here) commands necessary to create the site structure, add & deploy the solution & activate the features. You can start with a batch file, and get as complicated as you want.
Personally I don't find that creating a site definition is really that useful for the sites I have built. They can be very tricky to set up, because of their complex nature.
What I do is use the standard Publishing Site and then using features to add my additional componets (deployed via a SharePoint solution).
You can use Feature Stapling to connect up the feature to the Publishing Site creation.
I've also just done a blog post on how to programmatically modify the workflow which is created by default: http://www.aaron-powell.com/blog/february-2009/programmatically-modifying-sharepoint-workflows.aspx (that also has a link in the comments off to the Feature Stapling concept).
Then I use a combination of SharePoint Solution Installer (http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller) and batch files to install the components. SSI for all the SharePoint database level installs and batch files for the file system stuff.
Adding another answer, because I have more than 300 characters worth of stuff to say :(
RE: SharePoint solutions generator, again I would say your mileage may vary.
The biggest issue with SharePoint dev is managing all of the "magic strings" across the various configuration files. GUIDs and Fully Qualified Assembly names are the spit and glue that hold the whole thing together, and although it all makes sense its very difficult to manage.
The current crop of tool all try and alleviate the complexity of managing these things, but they require that you work in a certain way, so the tool knows how to inject the appropriate plumbing.
If you plan on doing a lot of work with SharePoint it really behooves you too learn to manage the plumbing yourself. Its painful up front, but really pays dividends.
Basically, I suggest you spend your time learning the platform and not the tools. Once you know the platform, using the tools will be much easier.
If you are doing this as a one-off engagement and just want to get it done, I'm sure you can get any of the tools you've mentioned to do the trick.
I would agree with the use of the out of the box publishing site definition, and then customizing it using Site Collection features (Master Page, Page Layouts, CSS) and site features (create lists, pages, sub sites, defining master pages of sites, etc...).
Feature stapling is great when you want to customize new sites (allow user to create new sites) of well known site templates, like customize the "My Site" look and feel. In this case I don’t think its very useful.
As a tool to help this task, I personally use STSDEV (http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev) to help in creating, programming, debugging and deploying my Sharepoint solutions.
First it creates a good project for Visual Studio (clean, or with some nice "starting point" definitions). Then it includes some “build configurations” that really helps with install, deploy and upgrade in the development machine.