New Web Controls in SharePoint Designer 2010

To enable some of the new features in SharePoint 2010, new controls were created that you can use in your master pages. Below are few of the new controls and their purposes as they relate to customizing a master page. A complete list can be found at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.aspx

Control	Description
CssRegistration	Tells SharePoint to insert a CSS link
SPRibbon	Adds the Ribbon to the page
Popout Menu	Adds the breadcrumb menu that shows the current location
PageStateActionButton	Adds the Edit/Save button to a page
AspMenu	Represents the ASP menu control
WarnOnUnsupportedBrowsers	Displays a warning to users who are using an unsupported browser, such as Internet Explorer 6

List or Library shows blank pages

This is very common issue when user closes out list web part on any of the list or library pages

Troubleshooting

• Open faulty page in web part maintenance mode to check is there any web part / script added to that page or not
• Once it’s confirmed go back to faulty page
• Click on Site Action > Edit Page
• Click on Add a Web Part option
• Then from the web part category list navigate to bottom most categories – Closed Web Part
• Select it and it will give you “untitled” (in most cases) in the right pane
• Select and click Add
• That’s all; you will be back in business

Now what in case someone deleted the web part

• No worries open the same page in SharePoint Designer
• Click on Insert and from the data view category choose the option related to your page (New, Edit or Display)
• Add it to the respective page and that’s it.

Feel free to reach me in case of any issues, thanks

Send reminder emails via SharePoint Designer Workflow

Last week one of my user asked me to design a reminder email which should be sent out 2 days before due date. He had a large list where there are thousands of items and he needed it to be approved / reviewed by assignee before it crossed the dead line. He already had a Due Date column which is Date and Time type and showing only date. Below is the design logic I used to achieve this requirement

Design Logic:

• Create a new column (I called it Today) with Date and Time category and select to display only date
• Create another column (Diff), type calculated, and simply add this formula

=[Today]-[Due Date]

That’s all from List end, now open up site in SPD

• Create a new workflow based on List
• Select respected list, specify name of that workflow
• Then select condition – If current Item filed equals value
• Put current item > Diff  in field and value to 2
• In action tab select send an email
• Fill all required stages
• Save and publish the list
• Now open the list and check if the workflow fires or not

Feel free to reach me in case of any issues, thanks

Whats new in SharePoint Designer 2010 (and whats missing)

SharePoint Designer is a single tool that helps you do so much more with the SharePoint, with little or no coding. 

In the Share point designer 2010 there have been some enhancements and as an Administrator its important to understand these enhancements.

Features such as Contributor settings, Database Interface Wizards, Site Publish, Site Backup and Restore are no longer available in the Designer 2010. 


Additionally SharePoint designer offers new capabilities to create web part pages, master pages, lists and workflows, setting permissions for individual users; and saving and deleting site templates. 

Also you can extend share-point 2010 ribbon using standard Development APIs to fulfill application & corporate requirements using SharePoint designer 2010 you can customize both Ribbon and drop down lists to display site lists, available webparts, workflows, or other information as needed.

refer the link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179083.aspx to get more information on this part. 

SPD workflow Failed on start (retrying)

I have been wrestling with this issue for about 60 days, the issue occurs when you create a simple OOB SPD workflow or even a Nintex workflow.

The solution to this is two parts

PART I

=================

The service account should be a part of

1. Looked at the groups in the local machine

· WSS_WPG

· WSS_ Restricted

· WSS_Admin_WPG

· IIS_WPG

2. Checked on the SQL management studio  > security > logins > Service account > properties > server roles were given as dbcreator > security & system admin > public

      Looked in user mappings the service account  was set db owner

3. >> Looked in the application content database in SQL

      service account should be  is a db owner

4. In  Central Admin page  > policy for web application > add service account as full control 

5. CA > operations tab > update farm administrators group > service account is added there

6. looked in the site > site settings > site collection administrator

7. looked in the component services > dcom config > IIS admin service > security > added the service account to launch and activation > access permissions > and Configuration permissions .

After doing all these settings the service account must have all the require permissions

PART II

===============

Second part of the solution is change the service account from the central admin page & run an IIS reset

this is the main key and you will have to compulsorily do this to resolve the issue

hope it works for you

Breadcrumbs shows wrong URL

Today I have gone thru a very good example of auto redirection. I was doing some routine exercise on a custom list and converted it to XSLT view in SharePoint Designer to customize it. For safety I took couple of copied of AllItems.aspx page and started customizing default one. For some reason I did not like customization and I deleted the original AllItems.aspx and renamed the copied one.

Issue:

Now when I go to List Settings from browser and click on the list name in bread crumb it redirected me to Web Portal.

(I went to list settings to delete the list, but suddenly I found I was deleting something wrong J) this was more than shocking to me as I missed to make necessary changes.

Resolution:

This was really small and easy change I made, went to SharePoint Designer > Browsed to List > Right Clicked on Properties > Supporting Files > Default view Page.

Make sure it displays “AllItems.aspx” page, in my case it was blank.

Rename wiki page title in MOSS 2007 / SharePoint 2010 without changing site URL

In Wiki pages if you change the page title it will also change the site URL.
So if you have put it as a reference on any site that link will be broken
Here is the method I have successfully used to change the page title without changing the site URL

• Open the SharePoint site in SharePoint Designer


• In Design mode select the page title, and rename it


• Here I have found very weird behavior that in code window <title> parameter is missing so to generate <title> parameter remove Page Title from the design view


• Page title is associated with “SharePoint:ListItemProperty”, so when we remove page title from the page this parameter will be removed in the code <SharePoint:ListItemProperty runat=”server”/>


• Now in the design window add your own title which will generate <p> your title </p> parameter in code and you can refer this parameter for any future changes.

You can hide the page (Wiki page) title by simply adding comment “<!-- <p> title </p> -->”
Feel free to reach me in case of any queries.

No one is able to delete a particular document from a document library

One of the very fresh incidents I have gone through. In my SharePoint farm for a specific documents library No one is able to delete a particular document from a document library

Below steps are followed to resolve this issue:
I tried using my Farm Admin account but no luck
I have tried to delete this doc using STSADM, Powershell, content & structure, and even SharePoint manager. All of which error saying the document is checked out or locked by a user. I have also tried turning off the Force check out feature.
No luck

The odd thing is, that the document icon, does not show as though it is checked out. And the drop down menu only has "check out", but when you try that, you get an error stating the document was NOT checked out.

If you try to delete via explorer view, it pops right back up after a page refresh.

When I look at its properties in SharePoint manager, it shows the document as checked out to that same user, but it also shows that I checked it in via content & structure. So it also says the checkout status is "short term", but I waited until the lock "should have" expired, and tried to delete it again. But no luck, it just pushed out the lock expiration.

This library has hundreds of documents; to delete it and re-create it would not really be a possibility. I am able to upload new docs and delete them.

Resolution
Finally none of the above steps helped me to delete the document so I used SharePoint designer.
Opened the site in SharePoint Designer and just browsed to that document library, selected those documents and deleted it, which was deleted without a question.

Still I am in search how this happened !!

How to upload a document to multiple document libraries simultaneously?

This might be a known issue and thee might be so many solutions to resolve this, but my issue is resolve using below method so I am posting this on blog..

·         Let’s say we have to upload Documents to Test1 (Source Doc Lib) and Test2 (Destination Doc Lib) Document Library simultaneously

·         We can achieve this task by creating SP Designer conditional workflow

·         Refer following figure.

·         Open SharePoint Designer 2007 and then click on New > Workflow

·         On the Define your new workflow stage provide a meaningful name and select a startup type as per

your requirement.

·         Under that box you will get option to select which on which list you want to enable that workflow.

·         Click Next.

·         It will prompt you the Conditions and Actions page

·         In Condition select – Modified by specific person condition

·         Then click on specific person label and it will open option as shown in following figure

  

·         Select User who created current item option and add it to Selected Users box

·         Reason behind selecting this option is when any user uploads a document to that specific Doc Lib it will be automatically updated to destination Doc Lib

·         Then click on Actions button which will give you below option

·         Select Copy List Item option and then select copy item in Test1 (Source Doc Lib) to Test2 (Destination Doc Lib)

·         Click finish, which will finish setup of workflow on Doc Lib Test1

·         Now go to Test1 (Source Doc Lib) and upload a document.

·         In that Test1 you will see a column with the same name with which you have created a workflow, and it will give you in progress status.

·         Just go to Test2 (Destination Doc Lib) and you will get the same document listed over there.

·         And when you come back to Test1, In progress status will be over and it will give you Completed status.

Attention: One more thing I would like to specify at the end, if you have selected Manual start then you have to manually start the workflow associated on that Doc Lib.