Using some simple JavaScript, you can redirect users from the normal SharePoint NewForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, and DispForm.aspx forms to your custom pages or where ever you want to send them. We use this a lot when creating custom application pages for cutom forms. For whatever page you want to redirect, you need to get a Content Editor Web Part on your page, or use SharePoint Designer to add the javascript. I suggest a Content Editor Web Part as it's a little more flexible and won't ghost the p... [More]

Improving your custom SharePoint solution's performance is an important and worthwhile effort. If your application's lists have a few hundred or less items, then performance may not be a big deal. Such low numbers are easy to process and the servers can handle it with ease in most cases. If your lists contain several hundred or more items, then you seriously need to consider your application's performance. I'm writing this blog off the tail of going through such an exercise for an applicat... [More]

A while back I shared some javascript for settings all of your external links within SharePoint to open into a new window. I've since cleaned it up using JQuery and included a scenario if the link is in a document library (using different content types). Below is the revised code. <script type="text/javascript">$(document).ready(function(){  var url = '://' + window.location.hostname // get the current website name, and i add :// to make sure we're looking at the right name in t... [More]

We had a customer with a unique setup for their email. They needed all emails in SharePoint to be sent through an alternate port. Seeing as there isn't a way for SharePoint to select the outgoing port, I had to get a little creative. I have SharePoint sending email to my local SMTP on the server, which is then redirecting to the Exchange server on the alternate port. Here's what I did. My SharePoint Server Install SMTP, use IIS6 Management to manage. Go to properties of SMTP Virtual Serve... [More]

Everyone once in a while I get a customer who goes crazy over our DHQ product and they want it to do it all. I love that. The latest request is to load some SharePoint data into the masterpage of the site. Why? Because there’s white space up there they can use. I’m not a huge fan of killing all white space, but this customer wanted to load up certain daily info which pertains to their department.Below is what they want to fill in   Not necessarily fill all of it, but somewhere... [More]

In most of my workflows, and my custom code, I use System.Net.Mail to send emails. Using SharePoint’s resident SendMail within workflows never worked well for me. I’ve developed features for WSS3 and MOSS 2007, both using the SMTPClient and MailMessage. When I took a feature I wrote for WSS and installed on a MOSS server, the code errored: Error OccuredSystem.FormatException: The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address.    at System.Net.Mime.Mai... [More]

In a rare occurence, a listformwebpart may get corrupted. We're not sure how or why, but it can happen. In this one certain scenario, the dispform.aspx form was corrupted. As a result, users couldn't click to view the items, and their custom data view web parts broke. I fixed it by rebuilding the web part in the page, following the below link: http://moblog.bradleyit.com/2008/10/broken-sharepoint-list-forms.html Enjoy!

Recently I ran into a rather annoying issue and after lots of testing and research I think I found the reason. Here's the scenario: Windows SharePoint Services 3 site, internal access http://wss3, external https://share.domain.com:444. Central Admin Alternate Access Mapping had the default zone http://wss3 and the intranet sone https://share.domain.com:444. The site works great from inside and outside the network. Outlook 2010 installed on laptops. The Outlook users browse to http://wss3 i... [More]

Very very annoying error, I know. This is one of those errors that Microsoft decided not to provide a lot of detail. I just spent the better part of 2 hours searching the web trying to find a solution. I found a lot of differing fixes, but none seemingly applied to me. I finally sucked it up and applied each solution I found even though "I know that's not the issue." Silly me. I had this occuring on two servers at the same time, a customer server and my development server. The is... [More]

There are a few web parts out there that will automatically scroll through your lists. These are pretty and work well. They will slowly scroll through your lists like a news ticker. My issue with these is that my primary customers are police officers, and very rarely do they want to slowly read through a list. Most of my  police department customers' roll call lists have dozens of items, all active and all urgent (it being roll call and all). They didn't want t... [More]

I recently had to create some functionality for a customer to take a subsite, and duplicate it for backup purposes. I would normally walk them through the process using stsadm or use Save Site as Template but they wanted a simple method of doing it. I created them a on click solution. My code is below. We were going to move forward with the SPWeb SaveAsTemplate option but the site was too large. Even after increasing the template size SharePoint still errored. See KB Article 960969 for more det... [More]

As a SharePoint developer, you may be creating a web part and for the sake of testing you throw it up on your site. Then you decide to rename your class or get a new public key token for your class or something like that. After doing so, your page might stop loading with the following error. You may not be a developer, you simply obtained a web part from another party and now it's not working and you get the following error. An error occurred during the processing of . Could not load file... [More]

A growing commonality we're seeing is allowing external visitor access to SharePoint, whether it's a police department rolling it out their community or an organization wanting to allow it's 80+ volunteers access. The most cost effective way to do this is to use forms authentication and SQL server to store the membership database. You can use the same Active Directory your site is running on now but then you need to license each user in your network. Using SQL server stores the user account... [More]

Unfortunately I know this first hand. We were working on a customer's SharePoint instance and had to uninstall a feature. So using stsadm we went to uninstall the feature and forgot to include the feature part of the command. So we ran stsadm -o uninstall........... and uninstall it did! It completely uninstalled SharePoint from the server with no prompt or warning! The only thing left was the configuration wizard and the IIS websites were stopped. I reran the configuration wizard and received ... [More]

In one of my customer's MOSS implementations we're using SharePoint's resident permission management to control who has access to what InfoPath forms. The issue we came across is that if a user has read-only access to a form and opens it, they can see the Update button. Clicking it does error and denies the change, and after the error the user gets the typical form closed message. We wanted to hide the button from the view of a user who has read-only permissions to deny the error all together... [More]