Under normal circumstances you cannot move a workflow designed in SharePoint Designer to another site, or into Visual Studio for further customisation/development.
I believe it is possible but was looking for some pointers on approach/technique and maybe some links to more information.
I know some MVPs (Todd Bleeker and others) have been working on this in the past, but I have yet to find a definitive solution to the issue.
Also does anyone know if MS are considering improvements to the Workflow designer within the next version of SharePoint Designer?
Here's a link which might help get you started.
The issue with Sharepoint Designer workflows is that they have essentially hardcoded all the List (and other) GUIDs into them, which just makes it impractical to generalize them.
From what I've heard, you can "just" move the XOML File into a new Visual Studio Workflow and then add the .cs and .rules files, but I also heard conflicting info about this.
I do not know if Microsoft plans improvements, but I also think that SharePoint Designer still has plenty of room for improvements.
Related
I'm new to SharePoint development and design. Someone recommended using SharePoint Designer as a quicker way to have the site have a specific look that is different from the SharePoint Look Book. We want sections of our page to have borders with rounded edges, and specific color headers. I found several contradicting articles about using SharePoint Designer. Do you recommend using it on the latest version of SharePoint online in 2022? Have you had any success, or have you encountered any issues?
I enable scripting on my site. I tried connecting SharePoint Designer 2013 to my SharePoint online site successfully, but would like to know if it's a good idea to move forward with it.
As you can read from here SP Designer is supported on the latest On-Premises version of SharePoint(2019) on the bare minimum. But as you can see it is a product that is steadily heading to it's end-of-support/deprecation lifecycle.
Also, as you can understand, since it's development was halted since the 2013 version, a lot have changed since then, and many of the new features are not even supported by SP Designer.
If your are trying to make modifications to a SharePoint Online site, I would suggest using more modern tools(PowerApps, Power Automate, Modern UI, SPFx etc) and leaving SP Designer to it's way to deprecation.
You can also, update your question in terms of what you are trying to achieve and we could propose you some ideas :)
In TFS 2005, from Team Explorer in Visual Studio, we used to be able to very easily view a documents properties and view the hyper-link. We could then copy this and share it in an email, intranet etc. We have recently upgraded to TFS 2012 using Sharepoint 2010 and I cannot seem to locate document hyper-links.
Is there an easy way to obtain these (without knowing the hyperlinks) or is there another easy way to share content stored in the TFS SharePoint document store? I can do it from the SharePoint Portal easy enough, but I don't really use this, I use Team Explorer and the TFS Web Screens mostly
Many Thanks
this question is quite a bit older, but: maybe I've got an idea?
In each work Item, you have a register "All links"
There you can put the hyperlink to your sharepoint document in. (Button "Link to", Link Type "Hyperlink)
We used this since TFS 2010 and I sumbled over this thread, 'cause we are running into an issue, where these linked documents could not be checked out after opening.
Regards
Jimmy
P.S: maybe, I completely misunderstood?
I'm a developer with 5 years of MCMS development and without a single know how with SharePoint.
I want to use the CMS capabilities of Sharepoint to migrate my applications but I DONT KNOW HOW TO START!!!!!!
In my actual projects i have a Visual Studio solution with all my code, my templates and my usercontrols...
I cannot see how can i do the same thing with Sharepoint :(
I want to customise my site like i did before, i want to create pages based on templates like i did before.
Anyone knows where i can find a walkthrough that explains me that?
Thank U All.
Unfortunately I think you are going to have to learn SharePoint. Even the WCM features are a big topic, and probably the best book is Andrew Connell's "SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development" - I don't think a 2010 version is available yet. The good news is that I think the MCMS product had a big influence on how the SharePoint WCM features were architected, so the underlying principles will be similar.
SharePoint 2010 has a Visual Web Part that will encapsulate a user control which might make the transition easier. Also see my answer to this question about converting an ASP.NET site to SharePoint which might have some relevant information.
Most of the information about converting from MCMS to SharePoint is for the 2007 version of the product. This two-part article on MSDN seems to be the best starting point.
I cannot see how can i do the same thing with Sharepoint :( I want to customise my site like i did before, i want to create pages based on templates like i did before.
Problem is, SharePoint is not MCMS, no matter how Microsoft tries to brand it as its successor.
Creating sites in SharePoint is almost opposite of how things we were done in MCMS were you build from the ground up using ASPX templates, user controls and placeholders. In SharePoint, you'll have to strip out most of the OOB stuff you don't need. The recommended approach to custom development is through web parts, CAML, and the SharePoint APIs.
Pros and cons of editing sharepoint master page in sharepoint designer or visual studio? Which one do you prefer
SharePoint Designer
Pro:
WYSIWYG editing
Very fast turaround Edit/save/test
Con:
No Version control
Cumbersome reuse/deployment
(Download/Upload)
Visual Studio
Pro:
Integration with Source Control
Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework
Con:
Pure source code editing
Cumbersome Edit/Deploy/Test cycle
SharePoint Designer & Visual Studio
My recommendation is to use SharePoint Designer to develop the master page on your development machine. Then save the MasterPage into a Visual Studio solution for deployment to Test/Production:
Pro:
WYSIWYG editing
Very fast turaround Edit/save/test
Integration with Source Control
Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework
Con:
You need both tools, but SharePoint designer is free and this is in general the most efficient way of developing for SharePoint. Make what you can using SPD and the Web UI, then save it into a Visual Studio Solution for version control/deployment
For the most part I agree with what Per Jakobsen answered above. ESPECIALLY for SharePoint 2007.
Additional comments on the Pros/Cons of SharePoint Designer 2010:
I have actually had very good experiences with using SharePoint Designer exclusively for most of the "front end" work. Meaning, anything that is not a Server Side Web Part...
Regarding the "Cons" listed above:
Source Control -
Setting up the SharePoint Version Controls for the document libraries that store the web pages you are working on does a fairly decent job of managing Source Control - which is handy when you are doing development work on the Production server. (see below)
Cumbersome reuse/deployment
Not sure what is being referred to here, but I THINK it is in regards to developing code in one place, and then deploying that to a production server.
With permissions set correctly users are not impacted by development work because they will see the pages/code that is checked in, approved and viewable.
While I would normally hesitate to operate on production directly, there are many scenarios with SharePoint that require this - especially if you are editing XSLT data directly, etc. (what comes to mind off the top of my head are references to List or Library GUIDs and other "variables" that will be different between servers)
Cheers!
Although I don't know why, SPD also changes your <%# Register ... %> tags: it strips any leading "~" from the src="~/_controltemplates/..." attribute. You need to manually add them back in before publishing.
Basically need to use SharePoint (because we promote MS yay!) as a content management system for an internet facing site.
How do I get rid of the default SharePoint look and feel and make it look like however I want it to?
I know the process involves creating a new masterpage with SharePoint Designer. However I prefer to code webpages rather than use a visual editor. Is this possible? Do I need knowledge of .NET?
Just check out ferrari.com for a very well made redesign of a SharePoint site.
Heather Solomon's Branding SharePoint series would be a good place to start. There's a lot you can do just with CSS, JS and HTML, but the most complete solutions (like Ferrari) require some pretty extensive customization with .NET and other SharePoint development techniques (features and delegate controls, in particular).
Your branding effort will be a lot easier if you only need to heavily brand the public-facing "publishing pages", from which you can remove most of the SharePoint-specific elements that make branding difficult.
Also, SharePoint Designer has a source view if you don't like the visual editor.
Yes it is possible to make it look like however you want it to (as you've seen from the Ferrari site). However to create that sort of site takes a lot of work.
Microsoft recommend the use of SharePoint Designer for 'designing' pages and layouts. However changing their behaviour almost always needs Visual Studio and development in .NET. You can largely avoid SharePoint Designer (which may worth considering as it can be a PITA) with an open source tool such as SPVisualDev. Use this with WSPBuilder for packaging your solutions (and avoid VSeWSS where possible).
Considering it sounds like you're just getting started, be aware this is a big topic with a reasonable learning curve. Read a good book on the topic such as Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 by Andrew Connell. It takes you through most things you will encounter from the ground up.
I'm working my way through Real World Branding by Andrew Connell at the moment. It seems like a good demonstration, with code.
Plus the Heather Solomon articles as suggested by dahlbyk are always informative.
Just changing the theme, or creating a custom theme for the site, can go a long way towards making SharePoint look a lot better. It's also a lot less intensive then changing the master pages.
How to create a theme
How to deploy a theme
Example customization you can do with just CSS
Does the EULA allow you to disguise the fact that it's MS software?
Remember, you didn't buy the software, you're just paying for the privilege of using it.