It appears my customer and I are on the cutting edge of InfoPath development with Form Services. We are CONSTANTLY running into issues and bugs. I try my best to post what we find to help anyone else running through the same issues. This issue is a doosy.   Our scenario is this: We have 3 server farms setup, one for development, one for staging and testing and one for production. We are creating InfoPath forms in Visual Studio 2008 and each have loads of codebehind (handling loading,... [More]

Now this might be common knowledge to some, but it came as a pain in the butt surprise to myself and my team. There are a few gotchas with using CAML in SharePoint, specifically with the SPQuery object. The results of using it incorrectly can cause missing data, which will cause a man to go crazy looking for a solution. I primarily use U2U CAML Query Builder Tool to create my CAML queries and then modify them as I need in the code. I recommend downloading this free tool and use it to generate yo... [More]

I wrote a web service that queries the users in certain groups and I bound a dropdown in my InfoPath form to it. The web service requires two values, the site name and the group name. In using the InfoPath Data Connection wizard I specified the values. We now are looking to move this form to another server (from dev to staging to prod) and this form is going to become the base for about a dozen other forms, so changing this value manually every time will become a hassel at best. I figured out... [More]

Microsoft announced March 30 that SharePoint Designer 2007 is now a free download! http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx SharePoint Designer is a great tool for easy customizations of your existing SharePoint sites. You can make simple workflows, cross site data shares and customize the look and feel of the site.  

Every once in a while a WSS installation won't search. When searching in WSS we get the standard nothing was found. In the Application Event Viewer we see the following Level: WarningSource: Windows SharePoint Services 3 SearchEvent ID: 2436Task Category: Gatherer Event Data:The start address <sts3://dhq/contentdbid={20ef7238-e02f-4938-94cb-791b0581042c}> cannot be crawled. Context: Application 'Search index file on the search server', Catalog 'Search' Details: Access is denied. Check... [More]

When using the XML web part in SharePoint, I received the error: The XSL specified by the XSL property or XSL Link property is not valid, or the XSL file cannot be accessed. Make sure you have specified a valid XSL style sheet for this Web Part, or if the XSL file is linked that it can be accessed by the server. For assistance, contact your site administrator. More about making XSL files accessible. I received this error after using SharePoint Designer to update the default.aspx page by a... [More]

By default the calendar is in a list view, and will list the upcoming dates in order. One of the benefits of SharePoint is the clean graphical view of the calendar. It looks like Outlook and is easier to read and understand. We have found many customers enjoy the calendar view instead of the Current Events list view so they switch the view. When the calendar is switched to week or month view, the page get's stretched out and will normally cause the user to have to scroll horizontally to vie... [More]

So this was a fun error. Took most of a day to figure out, well, to find an answer. I found it on an MSDN Forum so I decided to share it here since It was on page 4 of a Google search. Very agravating. The error I was getting was The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again. when I was trying to SPListItem.RoleAssignments.Add(SPRoleAssignment) after a SPlistItem.BreakRoleInheritance(false). My original post in ... [More]

When running the following commandstsadm -o addsolution -filename c:\delphi\name.wspit errors and returnsObject reference not set to an instance of an object.c:\delphi\name.wsp: The Solution installation failed.This is because the windows account you're logged into the server with does not have permission to the SQL server. stsadm uses the logged in user's permissions to process everything, not the application pool identity central admin runs on.I hope this helps!

So this is quite the interesting issue. Apparently InfoPath HATES data sources that are not being used. If you have a data source that's not assigned to anything, say a dropdown list or something, then the form doesn't like life. For example, I had a data source that was in my IP form which was the lookup for a dropdown but then I replaced it with another lookup list. Now this data source is doing nothing, just hanging out, unassigned and alone. The data source gets moody, frustrated and then do... [More]

If you haven't been under a rock for the last bunch of years and have heard of SharePoint, then you should know Microsoft has a free download available for Windows SharePoint Services 3 and MOSS. The download includes 40 templates to use in SharePoint. From employee management, to vacation requests to project management, they are there and all free. Click here to download from Microsoft's site.To install these freebies, there are two different methods you must use. Half of the templates are... [More]

If you're not using one of the 40 free fabulous application templates from Microsoft for SharePoint v3, then you need to! These are great templates, and best of all their free!I continue to explain my story a bit, so if you just want to know how to fix it, scroll down to THE FIX.But what happens if you want to modify them? I was slamming my head on the desk trying to figure this out. I’ve posted it to newsgroups and asked whoever I can find, and no one knew. I finally just tried something and it... [More]

It's been a while since my last post. I've been real busy, we lost a developer in January and have since hired a developer so the work load is starting to ease up. But I digress... This post covers a little annoyance most of my customers have expressed, so I finally fixed it. The issue is that if there are links that lead from the WSS site, like to http://www.delphi-ts.com/, they want these links to open in a new window, instead of taking over their current window. These links might be lo... [More]

Updated 10/10/08Special thanks to David Shephard for sharing the following fix: http://www.facebook.com/pages/NetIQ/17480979358. Did it work for you? I have since reloaded the entire app so I can't try it out.Come to find out, this is a real fun error. After spending hours troubleshooting and Google'ing, I have found nothing. This is occuring on a WSS3 installation in AD Creation Mode. When I try to create a new user WSS creates the account in AD and emails the user but errors and will not add t... [More]

Specifically to Windows SharePoint Service 3.0, creating a custom form is rather easy. It took me a while to get this routine down and now I can create a custom form entry screen in minutes. When I say customizing a form, I'm speaking specifically to changing the layout of the EditForm, NewForm and DisplayForm pages for a list. You can customize these pages so you can have more columns than provided, make the form match the original paper form or remove certain fields from the NewForm but you wa... [More]