Book Review: Professional SharePoint Designer 2007

Finally, a book (and a great one in that) covering SharePoint Designer! I recently finished reading Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, authored by MVPs Woodrow Windischman, Bryan Phillips, and Asif Rehmani. With Microsoft making SPD 2007 available as a free download, it’s important that users of the product understand how to use it properly.

The authors did an incredible job covering the aspects of SPD from multiple perspectives. I enjoyed how they even included sections on developing solutions with Visual Studio. It was apparent those sections were added with the intent on getting readers familiar with the various options and methods they have available for developing extended functionality outside SPD, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t feel it’s advanced enough – remember that this isn’t a core development book.

The one thing I loved the most about the book was the style of writing; the authors did a great job simplifying walking through the features of SPD without losing my attention. The level of detail and simplicity was balanced very well throughout the book. I learned a lot of things reading this book and I believe any user, no matter how good he/she is with SPD, can learn a new thing or two from reading this book as well.

SharePoint Designer 2007 is a tremendous and powerful software. With Microsoft making it available to download for free, users need to have a strong understanding of how to work with it, and more importantly, how to avoid running into problems with it.

Tip: How to delete the default Shared Services Provider (SSP)

Here’s a quick tip for anyone new at administrating MOSS 2007.

When attempting to delete the default SSP through Central Administration, the “Delete” option is grayed out. To work around this, run the below command using STSADM.

stsadm –o deletessp –deletedatabases -force
The “–deletedatabases” parameter is optional. The “–force” parameter is required when deleting the default SSP. It’s optional when deleting any other SSP, and is used to force the timer job to complete the deletion.

Business Data Catalog in MOSS 2007

Overview
As per Microsoft, Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a “new business integration feature available in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. It is a shared service and it enables MOSS 2007 to surface business data from back-end server applications without any coding.”
Why BDC?
All the data entered into the Sharepoint system gets stored in the content database of that particular Sharepoint application. So by default, a Sharepoint site will get information from its content database. But it is quite natural for an organization to have information stored in multiple databases by numerous applications throughout the organization. For example, inventory software stores its data in a database that is different from a CRM software storing data in a database. But people will find is extremely useful if provided with a space where they can have every bit of information from each and every department in the organization ranging from the up-to-minute logistics information to the up-to-date sales analysis. The BDC feature of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 provides the needed business integration for integrating the line of business (LOB) applications with the Sharepoint.
What is BDC?
Business Data Catalog provides built in support for displaying data from two data sources.
· Databases
· Web Services
Microsoft promises a “no coding” approach for integrating LOB applications with Sharepoint. Business Data Catalog provides access to the data sources through a metadata model that provides a consistent and simplified client object model. So it is the metadata authors who describe the API of the business applications in xml. After this, the administrators will associate this metadata with the Sharepoint application after which the LOB data is available in the Sharepoint system.

Creating Lists using Sharepoint Object Model

before starting with the article first go through http://dotnetdreamer.com/2009/05/24/creating-sites-using-sharepoint-object-model/

Listed below are the Sharepoint site components and their corresponding object in the sharepoint object model.

Sharepoint Site Architecture Component Object in Sharepoint Object Model
Site Collection SPSite
Site SPWeb
List Collection SPListCollection
List SPList
List Field Collection SPFieldCollection
List Field SPField
List Item Collection SPListItemCollection
List Item SPListItem
Steps to create a new Sharepoint List:

Open Visual Studio. Create a new Windows Forms project.
Add a textboxes, one to accept the name of the site collection and another to accept the name of the new site to be created under the site collection.
Add a button that creates the new site.
Add reference to Microsoft.Sharepoint dll. This dll is represented by the name Windows Sharepoint Services in the Add Reference dialog box.
Add the namespace of Microsoft.Sharepoint dll like this.
using Microsoft.Sharepoint;
In the button click event, open the site collection.
SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite(txtSiteCollectionUrl.Text);
Now open the top level site of the site collection.
SPWeb site = siteCollection.OpenWeb();
If you want to open a different site under the site collection other than the top level site, you can use the overloaded methods of the OpenWeb() method that accepts the name of the site as argument.
The Lists property present in the SPWeb object will return all the lists that are present in that site as an SPListCollection object
SPListCollection listCollection = site.Lists;
In order to add a new list, use the add method of the SPListCollection object.
listCollection.Add(”listname”, “list description”, SPListTemplateType.GenericList);
Note that the third argument accepts the template in which the list should be created. GenericTemplate represents the custom list. We can choose the template we need from the SPListTemplateType enum.
Close and dispose and the site and site collection
site.dispose();
siteCollection.close();
The complete code can be found below..

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

SPSite siteCollection;
SPWeb site;

private void btnCreateSite_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

try
{
siteCollection = new SPSite(txtSiteCollection.Text);
site = siteCollection.OpenWeb();
SPListCollection listCollection = site.Lists;

listCollection.Add(txtListName.Text, “list description”, SPListTemplateType.GenericList);
}
catch (Exception)
{ }
finally
{
site.Dispose();
siteCollection.Close();
}
}

}
}

Hope this is useful.