SharePoint Thoughts

EnableViewState=”true”

Who knew such a simple little tag could cause such a headache. I recently completed a project where Master Pages were being used with ASP.Net Content Placeholders. In one of the content pages, state was not being maintained for any of the controls, and I had explicitly set the viewstate to enabled in every possibly place. It didn’t occur to me after 24 hours of banging my head against the desk, and code intervention from a couple of coworkers did I decide to take a look at the Master Page.

I discovered that no viewstate attributes had been set, and after setting these attributes, poof, it worked as expected, and viewstate was maintained. So the next time your DataGrid, GridView, Repeater, or any other control is not working for you, and you’re using Master Pages, take a look at that master page to make sure you’ve set the EnableViewState attribute. This might save you some time and a headache.

-Isaac

From the SharePoint Solutions Blog:

This is an oldie, but a goodie. Tony Bierman from the SharePoint Solutions team walks you through creating custom commands for the STSADM prompt, as well as a code example. This would be good if you have any packages for SharePoint that need licensing, and you want to wrap the activation into an installation script. Really the possibilities are endless. Andrew Connell has already created some custom commands using the method and released the source code for everyone to sample here.

Have you run into this error?

“Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: One or more field types are not installed properly.” ?

Well I did, I was banging my head into the wall, until I realized that the fields had been renamed at some point. Since the new name of the column was be referenced in the code using

SPListItem["FieldNameNew"]

When running a SPQuery. This caused the SPException to be thrown. To solve this, you should use the GUID of the column, or the previous field name. The lesson is when you change your column names, remember that its more of a vanity change, and the real field name stays the same.

From Microsoft’s Enterprise Search Blog:

“conceptClassifier for SharePoint adds automatic document classification and taxonomy management to Microsoft SharePoint and works without the need to build another search index. It is installed as a set of Features that, when activated, cause new columns to be displayed in the document library listings and new menu options appear that allow authorised users to edit the automatically generated metadata, if required.”

Concept Classifier is touted as an engine that automatically adds concept metadata and taxonomy data from documents being loaded to a document library. This sounds like Microsoft’s answer to some features more commonly available with other enterprise search engines such as Autonomy. What remains to be seen is how much configuration or training is necessary to produce accurate results. Competing search engines require some major tuning to produce the desired effects, lets hope Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST paves the way for friendlier enterprise search.

While this concept Classifier does not come directly from  Microsoft, it puts them a little bit closer to competing in Enterprise Search.