Author: Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

jQuery and SharePoint 2010 upgrade

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

Tripped me up for a whole day this one. We have a number of content editor web parts on our intranet home page. One was working, three others that used the jquery ui were not.

I checked that all the paths to the js and css files were there and valid. All OK (excepting that we hadn’t copied the jquery.min.js file into the layouts folder).

Problem turned out to be that in upgrading the content editor script, the html bits were stripped out. Each contained a javascript part and a html part.

I converted each to files, added the html back in and then linked to the newly uploaded file.…

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Creating Sub-sites via Web Service in SharePoint

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

Who would have thought that to create a sub-site you don’t use the admin.asmx web service, rather the meetings.asmx service.

After a day of friggin’ about using admin (because everything I read on the web said it was the one to use to create a site!), I stumbled across a blog post that told me I should be using meetings.asmx, because admin.asmx is only for creating Site Collections!

Yet another DUH! moment from Microsoft, or is it just me that thinks using a web service called meetings is not that obvious as the container of a method to create sub-sites….…

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InfoPath–Kerberos broke GetUserProfileByName

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

I have an InfoPath form that was working.

It uses the SharePoint GetUserProfileByName method to get the user’s details to populate fields on the form. The form, that was working, recently stopped working giving the error: “The following query failed: GetUserProfileByName” and words to the effect that the user is unauthorised.

Strangely enough it turns out the solution was related to a previous post here where a web service could not be accessed because the web.config dynamic value for the web service set the site back to the root site.

My form was pointing to the root site for the web service.…

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Getting List Items from SharePoint list

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

Today I am trying to populate an ASP.Net drop down list from the contents of a SharePoint list using the Lists web service.

I found this Microsoft page that was most useful in helping me to do that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/lists.lists.getlistitems.aspx

A couple of issues I struck that are mentioned in the article:

  • I was getting a SOAP error saying “Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes”. As mentioned in the above article this is due to Visual Studio putting a web reference in Web.config to the top level site rather than the sub-site in which the list exists.
  • Once the above was fixed, I got a second error: “InvalidOperationException: Client found response content type of ‘text/html; charset=utf-8’, but expected ‘text/xml’”.
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Who would have thought InfoPath was so picky…

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

My relationship with InfoPath is love hate. On the one hand it’s so easy to create web forms on the other some of the simplest tasks are incredibly difficult.

Take today’s task – putting a simple URL on a form to open a Nintex workflow page for the form. InfoPath lets you put a URL on a form, but you can only have a static URL or populate it from a data source. The data source must have the full URL.

Easy, make the full URL a calculated field…except that calculated fields can’t user ID as one of the fields. In the end I put a button on the form.…

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SharePoint filters evaluate criteria in order

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

Users requested that I filter a list of announcements so that the logic would work like:

(Show All Users Notices OR Staff Notices) AND (Posted before today AND expire after today).

The default filtering doesn’t let you put the brackets into the filter query. Turns out that SharePoint runs the query in order and ‘virtually’ puts brackets around things.

So my eventual logic was(((Show all Users Notices Or Staff Notices) AND StartDate before Today) AND Expires After Today).…

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Learning one new thing a day for a year

Posted on by Iain 'Cutty' Carlin

I thought this was an original idea, but googling it found that there are plenty of others doing the same thing. However, I will press on.

I often marvel at how much I have to look at Google every day in my job as a programmer. When I stop and thing about it, that equates to a lot of stuff that I learn without really knowing it.

S, I thought I would create this blog and keep a record for the next year of everything I learn that is new each day.

If nobody else gets anything out of it, at least I will.…

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