Showing posts with label SPD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPD. Show all posts

Saturday 7 December 2013

Restricting SharePoint Designer access

Overview: I dislike SharePoint Designer (SPD).  Depending on your companies/clients SharePoint governance, you can control the use of SPD on you farms.  My default position is turn it completely off.  SPD can be configured at web application (WA) or Site collection level.

My position is turn off SharePoint designer on your production and UAT farms.  If someone needs access they probably should rather do it in dev and package it for deployment or turn on specific access.  SharePoint CA can be used to configure how SPD can work on specific Web Apps.

Controlling SPD at a WA level is can be done via PS or using CA.  Tip: CA > General Settings > SharePoint Designer > Configure SharEPoint Designer Settings > Select the web app to edit and adjust accordingly.

More Info:
http://blog.ciaops.com/2013/06/disabling-sharepoint-designer-access-in.html

Monday 27 September 2010

SharePoint 2010 BCS workshop with Scot Hillier

Overview:  attended a workshop on Business Connectivity Services (BCS) given by Scot Hillier in Den Haag (The Hague).  I have used BDC in MOSS and the BCS in SP2010  briefly.  I can honestly say I am now a BCS convert.  I know BCS was an improvement on BDC but looking at the tooling and going building advanced BCS solutions is really powerful and covers a lot more that I understood or had seen in a previous demo.

Summary:
  • Office can use BCS - pretty obvious but I didn't realise the client application goes straight from the client application i.e. work/outlook to the SQL/WCF/.NET data type directly.
  • Double hop issue with NTLM.  Scot laid out a table to direct the options available for various scenarios that I will hopefully post here.
  • Secure Store Service is extensively used for authentication in BCS.
  • SPD has a good tool set for BCS.  Probably the place to start.
  • SQL 2000 doesn't work as an External Content Type (ECT) - this needs verification.
  • BCS doesn't support transactions and is not strongly typed however data access options can be intermingled to get transaction functionality if you need it. 
http://uscatu.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/business-connectivity-services-deep-dive-mdvwrk1-%e2%80%93-my-notes/  A far better summary was written by my fellow attendee Razvan-Petru.

BCS versions feature table

Saturday 31 July 2010

SharePoint 2010 simple reporting options

Overview: SSRS has it's place but I want to gather reports from a composite application where data is stored in SharePoint lists.
Solutions:
OOTB web parts - UI may be tricky to get right but useful for quick reporting that can be performed by power users for general business users. Use filter, List View (XLVWP), CQWP, data View, chart web parts.
Custom Web parts - either write or buy web parts for querying lists. Custom CAML queries provide a solution to display data. Con is that it's pretty development heavy, inflexible and requires code deployment. SPMetal has issues with joins, publish columns and hidden columns such as "Created by". Also see Ninetix reporting.
Dataviews - Displaying list data using SPD - need SPD access. Joining 2 lists.

Giles Hamson has a good chart explaining reporting options.

Friday 23 July 2010

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon for Developers

Overview: SP2010 implements the ribbon UI. Ribbon in the same as word 2007 ribbons in that it provides contextual actions that the user can use. This post looks at styling and controlling/extending the ribbons functionality.
Notes:
  • Ribbon is styled using corev4.css, this changes depending on if you apply a theme. css styling starts with "ms-cui" in the css.
  • SPD can add custom actions.
  • Ribbon is controlled by SP file 14\Template\global\xml\CMDUI.xml, this is merged with our custom xml file at run-time to result in an extended ribbon displayed to users.
  • Deploy the custom ribbon xml using a feature.
  • Buttons can be easily added or existing buttons replaced or hidden using XML declaratively to include custom ribbon actions.
  • Ribbon can also be modified programmatically (SPUserCustomAction)

Thursday 17 June 2010

XLVWP - Filtering the xslt List View Web Part Series

Overview: Xslt List View (XLV) Web Part is widely used in SP 2010. This series of posts shows how to use this Web Part. Various connected web parts can be used to filter the XLVWP such as a List Filter Web Part.

Filtering: The filtering web parts provides a good way to filter data in the XLVWP. Using Connected Web Parts it is easy to filter the data you wish to retrieve. Below is the setup of 2 List View Web parts that are used to filter depending on the selected data.


Presentation: SPD 2010 provides a good tool for customising the presentation of the XLV WP. Additionally you can uncouple the default shared XSLT and provide your own customised xslt.

Also see:XSLT List View Web Part (XLV):

Filter web parts are missing

I couldn't find the "filter web parts" on my SP 2010 installation, they are there just add them to the web part gallery.
In the RTM the filter WP are available by default and didn't need to be added.

A list of OOTB Web Parts

How Filter WP work from the MS site. Writen for MOSS but still applies to SP2010.

  1. Connect a filter Web Part to a List View Web Part to display a subset of data.
  2. The filter Web Part provides a value.
  3. The filter value is passed to a column in the List View Web Part by using a Web Part connection.
  4. The List View Web Part displays only those columns that match the filter value

Friday 4 June 2010

BDC is replaced by BCS in SP2010

  • Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the replacement for Business Data Catalog (BDC) (MOSS 2007). Brings external data into sharePoint. External data source can be SQL, or Web Services, so it is pretty easy to have CRUD Access to databases, ERP or third parties.
  • BCS has read and write support.
  • Both SPD (SharePoint Designer) & VS 2010 have tooling support for entity modeling to connect your line of business application (LOB).