I have created a workflow in Share Point Designer on our MOSS2007 dev server. (No one is allowed to have access to write .NET code yet as company policy)
In this workflow I am collecting data from the user, and both of my custom content types I created are marked as required, but the page isn't tossing errors when I don't supply values; not client side nor server side.
I checked the ..xoml.wfconfig.xml file and set the properties for required to true, I set the content type to required, and I used Share Point design to mark them as required. Nothing.
This is a out of the box installation except for the master page and style sheets. To make sure it wasn't that, I reverted to an out of the box style sheet.
Any ideas on what else to check / set?
Sharepoint can be a bit quirky. I followed this guide successfully to get required fields. I'm not sure its quite the same thing you are trying to do, but maybe it will get you going down the right track. Basically it uses Page Layouts and Content Types with to enforce required fields.
I'm curious to know if this method is so much different from the way you are doing it
Related
I created a custom Type that has a UserPart attached to it.
According to this issue on GitHub you can't add a CommonPart to content that also has a UserPart because it causes a StackOverflowException but I would still like items of my custom Type to show up in the content list. I already store CreatedUtc and PublishedUtc in the custom PartRecord, can I manually plug these in somewhere?
EDIT: For clarification, my specific scenario is that I am building a public facing Orchard website based on existing data that was used in a private application up to this point. I have a legacy table with user accounts that need to be mapped to Orchard Users but they also represent travel agencies that visitors should be able to browse and that Orchard admins should easily be able to edit and create through the Dashboard. I got the idea to create a TravelAgency type with a UserPart from Sipke's webshop tutorial
Content Types do not require to have a CommonPart to show in the Content List. If i remember properly its done by triggering the Creatable() in your migrations.
Also if you have a UserPart, you could Lazy loaded or just reference it via Foreign Key.
Why would you like something like that to be part of the Content List? I usually keep my business-specific Content Types tucked away in a nice section, so there are easier to visualise and use for users.
There is definitely a bug but as they comment you could extend taxonomies to accomplish your task and keep in mind sometimes changing the Orchard Codebase might fit your purposes, you only have to keep track of your changes when you upgrade next time. I have done it a couple of occasions to fit my projects.
If i remember properly, its been a while.. If you look in the core code where the Content List is created it looks for Creatable() Types. digging even more inside the code, chances are the Query in charge will join the CommonPart, hence your problem. You could easily add another query in the controller and add whatever you are after. The problem though, will be refactoring the rest of actions to accommodate your your type too. Way easier isolating your new Type. had to look at it for you, check this baby: Orchard.Core.Contents.Controllers.AdminController
Recently, we came across a severe problem in production farm with the Content Types. I would like to explain the background of this problem first.
We have nice working feature for Content Types installation in production and test farms. We developed and deployed (using wsps) this SharePoint feature in Visual studio. We are using the publishing pages using page layouts and Content Types to help content editors to quickly publish the web pages. Unfortunately, some Content Types and site columns have been manually updated/added by some people in the production, so whenever I (developer) make some changes to the existing Content Types (using Visual Studio and feature activation/deactivation) , SharePoint removes one or two columns (during feature activation/deactivation) from Content Types; or the columns which have not been added in a best practice way. I think the best practice is to update Content Types using Visual Studio.
Now, I wish to ensure that site columns shouldn't get removed from Content Types upon feature activation/deactivation.
Note: Our feature for Content Type activation/deactivation doesn't hold any activation dependencies in the feature.xml
Recommended Approach
Based on all these factors, my suggestion would be to:
• Create two Features: one for the original markup and one for making changes. (Or you can put them in the same Feature; I just want to differentiate between where you do what.)
• The original Feature should contain the CAML for Site Columns and Content Types. This ensures the IDs have been assigned ahead of type and remain constant.
• If you want to update a Site Column by changing nearly anything about it except its Field type, do it using a Feature Receiver. By doing this, you can call the Update method and pass in a boolean indicating if you want all the existing assets in the site that inherit from this to update to, (something you couldn't do via the CAML.)
• You can also add an existing Site Column (that you provisioned via the CAML feature) to an existing Content Type (that was provisioned via the CAML feature). This is helpful if the Column was not part of that Content Type before, etc.
• In a scenario like the one I just mentioned in the last bullet point, it's necessary to deactivate and reactive the CAML feature (to provision the new assets) before calling your Feature Receiver. What will this mean for the site? Since all the Site Columns and Content Types in the lists in the site are using the same ID's as the ones provisioned in the Site Collection root, removing its parent from the Site Collection won't change that. It might leave it orphaned temporarily, (i.e. there will be no relationship between that item and an item in the Site Collection root, but it will function the same way it always has, since it's really a fully-functioning copy of the original item) until you reactivate the Feature that puts the item back in the Site Collection. It's like the parents are going on vacation when you deactivate the Feature, and are coming back home when you activate the Feature again.
You have a choice when it comes to how you maintain the CAML and the Feature Receiver, since you have two scenarios: existing Site Collections and new ones.
• You could make a policy that every time you write code in your Feature Receiver to update a Site Column or Content Type, you have to make the change in your CAML as well. That would mean that every time you activated the CAML Feature in a "fresh" Site Collection, the CAML would be up-to-date and accurate; there would be no need to run the "updater" feature. (In your Feature Receiver, you should make sure you do some extra checking to make sure a Site Column doesn't already belong to a Content Type before adding it, etc. in case that change is already in place before the code executes.) This approach means you only have to execute one Feature when creating a new Site Collection, but it also means you're maintaining changes in two places: in your Feature Receiver for making changes to existing sites, and in your CAML for new sites. It's a cleaner approach, but also contains an element of redundancy, which always leaves room for human error.
• The other approach is to simply assume that every time the base CAML feature is activated, you're always going to execute the Feature Receiver. This approach says the only time you'd change the CAML is to add a new Site Column or new Content Type; otherwise, all the changes happen in the Feature Receiver. This approach reduces redundancy, but also means your Feature Receiver code could get quite large with all your changes over time, and it could leave your CAML as very much "legacy" over time.
Src: http://blog.beckybertram.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=eb3e1762%2Dbab0%2D4e96%2D8bc5%2Dd67d6e6bfd44&ID=18
Updating Content Types is still one of the underdeveloped portions of Sharepoint which sometimes causes trouble, especially in Content Deployment scenarios.
The best thing in your case would be to always avoid making any changes to content types by hand (using UI)
Whenever you are installing the content type, make sure that you remove the previous one and then install the new one. (Sometimes its not possible due to pages being already created out of it).
My current approach to deploying content types is to do as much as possible using code rather than CAML. That way it is easy to fully control the logic of updates, including ensuring that changes made manually don't cause conflicts. I have the structure defined as attributes on an interface I also use for strongly typed list access, but there are several other ways you could do it.
The only piece that isn't available in the API is setting a specific content type ID, so you need to have a caml file for that, but it's a small/simple file, doesn't try to make updates and is only referenced from a feature that will also run the update code.
I am working on a specialized instance of MOSS for a client where What I am wanting to do is hide elements on the master page. In particular, I want to hide the main top navigation bar, the search functionality and the label that shows up in the upper-left-hand corner that tells you the name of the site you are on. So I made a copy of the default.master, and then in SP Designer I set the visible attributes for the placeholders for these blocks to “false” in the new master file.
I can then assign the master to my normal site collection no problems and it seems to been working like I want it to. But when I go to look at the system pages (i.e. any of the forms or backend stuff), it is still using the old default master. And when I tried to set the System Master Page to my customized master file, my MOSS instance threw a File Not Found error. Then certain parts of the admin area just started failing in that same way (i.e. I would try to go into Site Settings -> Content and Structure and it also would throw a File Not Found error) Then at one point, the whole Site Collection would throw “Unknown Error” and there didn't seem to be a way to recover, short of reverting the state of the VM I am running MOSS in for development purposes.
So I am curious, what is the best way to create a custom master page and then hide elements on that page? I realized that my web cluster didn’t have the proper flag set up to actually show me real ASP error messages, so I am going to change that tonight when I get home and see what SP is really telling me about all of this. I have also read that changing the application.master file is not recommended, but I figured I could get away with making a custom page for the Site and System master pages and not worry about application.master. I have been reading a bunch of Heather Solomon articles as well as various other things. They all basically say that it’s ok to hide elements on a master page, but not delete them outright as SP will break if you do that. Would it be advisable to use a JS/CSS hack to manually hide elements that way, rather than actually making a new master page?
You create an asp:placeholder with the visible attribute set to false and place the contentplaceholders that are to be hidden in that container, weird I know but it works... as for the system.master you probably would want to make a copy of the system.master that SharePoint uses and then alter that one in the same manner.
Thank you so much for posting this. Works like a charm. I was so afraid because everyone says not to mess with the Application.Master. All I did was open it with Notepad and add Visible="false" (I wanted to hide the topnavigation bar because I have custom tabs that display depending on a user's permissions which are controlled by code in default.master. But then if a user had to upload a file, upload.aspx uses application.master and all the tabs would be displayed.)
I edited this line only:
wssuc:TopNavBar id="IdTopNavBar" runat="server" ShouldUseExtra="true" Visible="false"
Works like a charm!
Note that the following pages will also be affected:
Site Settings
View all site content
Workflow settings of a document library
Recycle Bin
Search results
I need to rename the content type I created a couple months back and
have been using for a document library, assigned site columns to, created
document library views for and have added workflow to.
It appears that this is quite simple to do under the site settings for content type. However it is often the simple, apparently straight forward things that cause unforeseen
issues.
Does anyone know of any gotchas when it comes to renaming a content type?
Here's some guidelines, the main statement though is:
The general guideline for evolving the content type IA is to never change or rename content types or their aspects, make new ones and hide the old ones.
You can set the SPContentType.Name property and then call SPContentType.Update(). Considering the guidelines linked to in Colin's answer you should test this in a non-production environment first.
I have a custom SharePoint application page deployed to the _layouts folder. It's a custom "new form" for a custom content type. During my interactions with this page, I will need to add an item to my list. When the page first loads, I can use SPContext.Current.List to see the current list I'm working with. But after I fill in my form and the form posts back onto itself and IsPostBack is true, then SPContext.Current.List is null so I can't find the list that I need to add my stuff into.
Is this expected?
How should I retain some info about my context list across the postback? Should I just populate some asp:hidden control with my list's guid and then just pull it back from that on the postback? That seems safe, I guess.
FWIW, this is the MOSS 2007 Standard version.
Generally speaking I try and copy whatever approach the product group has taken when looking to add functionality of my own. In this case they add their own edit/view/add pages via the list definition itself.
I built a solution that also needed its own custom "New" form, not open source unfortunately, though if you are interested you can download it, its called "Tagged Links" (Social Bookmarking for SharePoint) and you can find some links on my blog.
To give you a few hints and tips, the following should set you off in the right direction:
Created a new list definition.
Created a new Content Type In the content type you can define your own "FormTemplates" that references a Rendering Template which determine what gets displayed in the "Middle" bit of those forms.
Copied the standard Rendering Template, but then made the changes to it that I
needed.
Wrapped it all up in a solution, and deployed.
My Rendering Template actually included an overridden "Save" Button where I did a lot of the extra work I needed to do during the save.
Anyway, it is a little too much work in my opinion but, I think, it most closely matches the standard approach taken by the product developers. Let me know if you need more detail and I will see if I can put together a step-by-step blog post, but hopefully this gets you off on the right direction.
I would be surprised if you could do something in a _Layouts file that you can't do in a forms template. You have pretty much the same technologies at your disposal.
Looking at the way SharePoint works with ListItems and Layouts pages (for example "Manage Permissions" on a list item), I can see that they pass some variables in via querystrings:
?obj={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423},6,LISTITEM&List={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423}
Perhaps they grab the context back each time programmatically using these values.
I'm not using a custom "new form", so this might not apply. I added an event receiver to my custom content type and then do my custom code in the ItemAdded or ItemAdding events. This code fires when the event is added to a list. You can use the event receiver properties to get to the parent List, Web, and Site.
I'd like to think my issue is "special" here, since I am using a custom form. I chose to use a custom form rather than a custom FormTemplate simply because I'm doing a lot of stuff that's not very SharePoint list-like (making ajax calls to get info from a third-party app then generating some dynamic form elements based on that ajax result, then subsequent processing of that data on postback). I thought it'd be a nightmare to try this within the usual custom rendering template mechanism.
I also don't think I can supply the custom form declarations in the list definition itself, because I have multiple content types associated with this list, and each content type has its own custom form (the other type is thankfully much simpler).
Actually, my simple way of keeping the list guid in my hidden field was a very low impact way to address this specific problem. My main concern is that I'm not sure why the SPContext just loses all its usefulness when I postback here, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong.