Refer a SharePoint Field from Jquery

To refer a SharePoint field from Jquery use the below syntax: -

var requestId = $("input[Title='Request ID']");

The above line searches for all the input controls whose Title attribute is equal to "Request ID". Note that "Request ID" is the field name.

The variable requestId now holds a reference to the field "Request ID". If you want to hide the particular control then write requestId.hide()

Note the above will only hide the particular control and not the entire row. To hide the entire row use requestId.parent().parent().parent().hide();

Below is the complete script.

<script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
var requestId = $("input[Title='Request ID']");
requestId.parent().parent().parent().hide();
});

</script>

Enjoy!!!

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Hide columns in SharePoint 2010

Lets say you have a requirement where you want few columns to be hidden when adding/editing a new list item then you can do so by going to List Settings->Advanced Settings->Select Allow management of content types and click on OK button.

Now select the content type which is used for your list (In many cases it will be item) and in the resulting page select the column which you want to hide. In the subsequent page you can make the column hidden.

Cheers!

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Identical column in SharePoint

Many people wonder how to add a identical column in SharePoint. Well, a built in column is already there. You just have to add it.

To do this go to the "Modify View" of any list for which you need a identity column and try to find a column called ID. Check this column and save the settings.

Now if you add any new item to the list the ID column will increase automatically by one.

SharePoint Tutorials

SharePoint Tutorials

Here are some links that will help you to get good understanding of SharePoint concepts and Advanced topics.

1) The below site contains very good videos on SharePoint. The videos are mainly "How-to" videos. For example, how to add a new user to a site, how to Assign a task, how to delete a site and so on.

http://www.sharepointhostingprovider.com/sharepoint-tutorials/

2) Another nice video tutorial and hosting site is www.sharepointhosting.com. This site has lots of videos in its Archives. If you are new to SharePoint then its advisable to go through all the videos listed in this site in chronological order. After completion of this tutorial you will definitely gain lot of knowledge in SharePoint.

http://www.sharepointhosting.com/video_tutorials.html

3) Below is an excellent site to learn Web Parts. Moreover, you can also download web parts after completing a simple registration process. Few of the web parts provided in this site are "Weather web part", "Financial stocks web part", "Pie chart web part" and so on.

http://www.fastsharepoint.com/

4) If you are a developer then of course you cannot miss Microsoft SharePoint 2010 developer center. You have everything here. Starting from important downloads to code samples you can find everything.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

5) SharePoint 2007 is still in market and lot of companies are actually doing new development work in 2007 version. So I thought to include some sites related to SharePoint 2007. Here is a very good article on SharePoint 2007. If you have already developed against SharePoint object model then you can't miss this. Beginners can also have a look. There are few interesting things which as a SharePoint developer you should definitely know and visiting the below link will be a good start.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/19362/Developing-Office-SharePoint-2007-application

6) People who want to learn development in SharePoint designer 2007 then here is ultimate place for you. Click this link to start learning SharePoint Designer now!!

7) Another Interesting place to learn SharePoint 2010 is from dotnetcurry team. They have created tutorials for both Basic and Advanced users.

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=74

8) SharePoint 2010 developers cannot miss Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer guide. This is strongly recommended for all the developers.

Download SharePoint 2010 Developer Guide

9)  Another important and excellent site to learn SharePoint is 

www.learningsharepoint.com.

They have put lot of resources in their site and also some free stuff, Interview questions, forums and so on. 

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/tutorials/

You can also write to me if you need any guidance.

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Popular SharePoint Groups

Popular SharePoint Groups

Okay, so you want to learn SharePoint and you are serious about it. In that case it is always good to be part of a group. Popular SharePoint Groups will keep you posted on the latest happenings in SharePoint. This will help you increase your knowledge.

Well, that is the baseline....increasing knowledge...isn't it??

Check out the below groups which are popular and also my favorite groups: -

1) This group posts very good videos on SharePoint. There are videos for both beginners and Advanced users.

https://www.facebook.com/SharePointVideos

2) Another excellent group is the "Microsoft SharePoint" group in Facebook. Check the below link.

https://www.facebook.com/MSSharePoint

3) Lot of SharePoint experts are part of this group. This group is in www.Linkedin.com. You can ask questions and get some quality answers.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=42512&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

4) Another excellent professional group for SharePoint users in in Linkedin.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=58750&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Some Basics of SharePoint 2010

What Is SharePoint?

So what is SharePoint? There are two ways you can look at SharePoint—what it is and what you do with it. Think of the process of building a house. There are many different tools and materials that are combined for the final product. Each of the materials alone might or might not be anything by itself, but once they are combined with the proper use of tools, you have a strong, reliable structure that fulfills a purpose. In the same way, SharePoint is like the various tools and materials, and the final business solutions you build are like the house. There are many features and tools in SharePoint, and within this book you will see different ways to combine and structure them into business solutions.
 

If you head over to the official Microsoft SharePoint website (SharePoint.com), you will see a discussion of six capabilities that SharePoint provides. In the following sections, we summarize each of them.

Sites

Within SharePoint you can use sites to store and manage data in many different forms. You can create a site that publishes content internally for users: this is typically referred to as your corporate intranet. You can also push information to the web for public, anonymous access, which is referred to as your Internet site. You can also use sites to store and manage data that is used and referenced by a group of named users who have access to the sites. These are typically referred to as collaboration sites. Some common types of collaboration sites include project sites, team sites, and department sites. In some cases these collaboration sites are extended outside the corporation, and vendor and third-party users are invited to join in the collaboration. These types of sites are typically referred to as extranet sites.

Communities

Communities are the various social features that allow us to collaborate more efficiently. These features can help you locate other users within your organization on the basis of information about them or their areas of expertise. Once you are connected, you can easily communicate and collaborate with them through their My Sites. Communities also provide some tagging and rating features. These features allow you to quickly classify content, and these classifications are shared across the organization and used by others as they try to locate content.

Composites

Composites define the way that you can interact with various line of business systems within your organization. Using the composite features, you can easily incorporate business data into SharePoint. The two primary features within the composites structure are Access Services and Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Access Services allow you to use Microsoft Access to build and configure applications that can be published to SharePoint. Users will have visibility to the data within SharePoint, through the browser alone, without needing to have the Access client installed. BCS is used to configure connections to external data. Once the connection is configured, the external data is available within SharePoint through the standard features of lists, metadata, and external content types.

Content

Within the content features of SharePoint, some of the most common features are records management, document management, web content management, and search. The records and document management features allow you to manage how data is added to the environment and let you create policies to manage data compliance.

Insights

Insights are considered the business intelligence features within SharePoint and include the following technologies: Excel Services, Visio Services, Chart web part, key performance indicators (KPIs), and PerformancePoint Services. These services provide the capabilities for you to use common tools such as Visio and Excel to manage and report on data, while allowing users to access the content without needing a client application. 

The chart and KPI features can connect to the data that is published through the services, giving you another way to present the data to your users through SharePoint. PerformancePoint is a downloadable application that allows you to create rich charts, graphs, and reports on data that is stored within SharePoint, Excel Services, or SQL Server. As with the other tools mentioned earlier, the reports are generated within the PerformancePoint dashboard builder and published to the SharePoint sites, allowing users to have clientless access to the data.
 

Search 

The search features within SharePoint allow you to easily find and locate relevant content. Since search is configured for both content and people, users within the organization can rely on search to help them quickly find what they need. The search experience is completely configurable, allowing for each organization to provide a search experience that best works for its users.

So now that we have covered some of the primary functionality available within SharePoint, let’s dive into the different versions of the product. There are several versions of the product, and it is important to understand what version you are working with so that you can fully understand the features that are available for you to use in your solutions.

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SharePoint 2010 Installation for developers

SharePoint 2010 Installation for developers

Lot of people think that SharePoint Foundation 2010 can be installed on a 64 bit machine only and in order to find out if their machine is 32 bit or 64 bit they check the System Information and find that they have a 32 bit operating system installed which means they can't Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 :(. That's frustrating!!

Well, don't be too sad because you are doing it all wrong. Take a note of the following.

Since you have a 32 bit operating system doesn't means that your machine will not support 64 bit operating system. Most of the intel/AMD procesors designed after 2007 support 64 bit architecture. Which means you can install both 64 bit and 32 bit operating system on your machine. You can check this quickly by running the below command in command prompt: -

wmic cpu get DataWidth

If it says 64 bit then you are all set :-)

First install a 64 bit operating system like Windows Server 2008 R2. Once the OS is installed then install SharePoint foundation 2010. Additionally you can also install Visual studio 2010 and  SharePoint designer 2010.

Interesting!!

Some interesting facts about Microsoft SharePoint:

• Microsft has sold more than 10,00,000,000 licenses of SharePoint till now.
• It is the fastest growing businesses in Microsoft history.
• Nearly, 0.7 percent of total websites available are in SharePoint.
• Microsoft has more than 3500 certified partners who use SharePoint.

Free SharePoint Hosting

People who are working in SharePoint or are interested to know how SharePoint portal really works need a place where they can go and try out things for free. 

For a developer they may want to try some advanced customizations of a SharePoint site through browser or through SharePoint Designer. Non - technical users can also try customizing a SharePoint Portal to gain some experience or to have an idea on the whole thing.

How about getting the ability to add workflows to your SharePoint sites for free!! What I mean is lets say you get a place where you can host a free SharePoint site and also get free workflows so that you can add business logic to your site. I believe that will be an icing to the cake.

Well, I will direct you to a place where you can do all these things. The company who is providing this facility is called as Nintex. It is one of the leaders in SharePoint Workflows. Click on this link to visit there site and create your free SharePoint 2010 or 2007 sites and workflows.

The limitation is you will need a corporate email id to register yourself. Once registered you will get user id and password mailed to your corporate email id.

So what are you waiting for visit Nintex's site and start enjoying the world of SharePoint.

All the above links will take you to the free registration page.

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SharePoint Content Types

SharePoint content types are a powerful way of customizing the Sites. Content Types define a  list item or group of list items in a List or Document Library. Content Types themselves contain a group of Site/user defined columns.

Imagine a scenario where you want to maintain a List of all customers of a company named "Doe wines". For this we should create a List called as "Customers". However, there are two types of customers of "Doe wines", one type of customers are individuals and the other type are companies. The data related to individuals and Companies will also differ. For example Individuals will have a First and Last name, Date of Birth etc. Companies may have Names, License type etc.

So to maintain both type of data in a single List we can use Content Types. We can create one Content Type called as IndividualCT and one more called as CompanyCT. Both will have their own set of columns.

Now in the Customers List we can just select New->CompanyCT and then create a customer who is a company. Similarly, we can create a customer who is an Individual by going to New->IndividualCT. Here both will be maintained in the same customer list.

What is a Feature?

People new to SharePoint must be wondering what a Feature is. So here it is, SharePoint Features are components which adds extra functionality to the site and can by Activated or De-activated by a Farm/Site/Web Admin.

Features can do lot of functions and adds lot of value to a Site. We can create a feature that can add extra menu items or do some validation etc.

Feature consists of two XML files. One is feature.xml and the other is a manifest file (like elements.xml). Feature.xml file simply informs SharePoint that a feature exists and can be activated/de-activated.

An example of feature.xml file is shown below: -

<Feature
  Id="[GUID]"
  Title="Hello World Feature"
  Description="A feature for Praveen's blog"
  Scope="Site"
  Hidden="FALSE"
  ImageUrl="classicmenu.gif"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

  <ElementManifests>
    <ElementManifest Location="elements.xml" />
  </ElementManifests>

</Feature>

The Manifest file is the one that describes the Feature. For example if a menu has to be added then what should be the menu name, description etc.

An example of a Manifest file is shown as below: -

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <CustomAction
    Id="NewMenu"
    GroupId="SiteActions"
    Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu"
    Sequence="201"
    Title="Hello Menu"
    Description="This is a classic menu"
    ImageUrl="_layouts/images/classicmenu.gif" >
      <UrlAction Url="http://techspoc.blogspot.com"/>
  </CustomAction>
</Elements>

Sharepoint 2007 Programming - Create a web application

SharePoint Object Model

SharePoint object model consists of a group of object that will help programmer to add programming logic to a SharePoint site. The base namespace for this is Microsoft.SharePoint.

The classes that will be typically used are SPWebApplication, SPSite, SPWeb, SPList, SPListCollection and so on. 

How to create a web application in Sharepoint 2007?

Open Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010, create a new Web application and set a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. If you are using Visual Studio 2010 then change the target framework to 3.5. 

In Design view, use the Toolbox to add a label, a text box, and a button to Default.aspx. To open the Toolbox, click Toolbox on the View menu. To open the code-behind file named Default.aspx.cs, double-click the button you added in the previous step. 

At the beginning of the file, add using directives (Imports statements in Visual Basic) that reference the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities, as follows: 

using Microsoft.SharePoint; 

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities; 

At the beginning of the class definition return the site collection object for the current request context as follows:

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
   SPSite oSite = SPContext.Current.Site;

}

Create a method that uses the AllWebs property of the SPSite class, the AllUsers property of the SPWeb class, and the Groups property of the SPUser class within nested foreach statements, in order to return a user object for the user name specified in the text box, as well as the list of groups to which that user belongs.
Within the default class in Default.aspx.cs, add the following method to return the users and groups for each Web site in the current site collection:

protected void GetSitesAndGroups()
{
   string strUser = SPEncode.HtmlEncode(TextBox1.Text) +
      " is a user in the following groups:<BR>";

   SPWebCollection collWebs = oSite.AllWebs;

   foreach (SPWeb oWebsite in collWebs)
   {
      string strGroups = "";

      /*Use AllUsers not Users to ensure you find the user*/
      SPUserCollection collUsers = oWebsite.AllUsers;
      foreach (SPUser oUser in collUsers)
      {
         if (oUser.LoginName.ToUpper() == TextBox1.Text.ToUpper())
         {
            SPGroupCollection collGroups = oUser.Groups;

            foreach (SPGroup oGroup in collGroups)
            {
               strGroups += SPEncode.HtmlEncode(oGroup.Name) +
                  "  ";
            }

            strUser += oWebsite.ServerRelativeUrl.ToString() +
               " -- " + strGroups + "<BR>";
         }
      }

      oWebsite.Dispose();
   }

      Label1.Text = strUser;
}

To run the code added in the previous step and avoid receiving an access denied error message, the user implementing the GetSitesAndGroups method must have Full Control permission. Add the following code to the Button1_Click event handler, which uses the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method to allow the current user to iterate through the users and groups of each Web site within the current site collection.

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedGetSitesAndGroups = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(GetSitesAndGroups);
   SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedGetSitesAndGroups);
}

On the Debug menu, click Start Debugging, or press F5. If a Debugging Not Enabled dialog box appears, make sure Add a new Web.config file with debugging enabled is selected, and click OK.
The browser opens the page. When you type the logon name of a user on a site within the current site collection, the label displays the Web sites and groups to which the specified user belongs.

To run the application after creating it in Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010, navigate to http://Server_Name/_layouts/Web_Application_Name/Default.aspx.

Sharepoint Virtual Labs

If you have a decent internet connection and you do not want to go through the burden of installing the sharepoint environment on you laptop/desktop then Microsoft has found out a easy way for you to learn and practice Sharepoint 2007/2010. This is possible by using Microsoft Virtual Labs.

Create your first SharePoint Site

Before creating a SharePoint site we should create a Web application. Inside the web application we have to create a site collection. A site collection can have number of sites and sub sites. By default a site collection will have one site which will be the root site.

1) On the windows server go to Start-->Programs and open SharePoint Central Administration.

2) Go to Application Management tab and click on Create a Web Application under "Sharepoint web application management" section.
3) Fill the values and click on OK button.
4) Congratulations! You have created your first web application.

Once a web application has been created we are ready to create a site collection.

1) Go to Application Management tab and click on Create a Site Collection under "Sharepoint Site Management" section.
2) Select the Web Application you just created and fill rest of the values.

3) After you have filled in all the required information, you can click the OK button to start the provisioning process. WSS will provision a new site collection containing a top-level site. The top-level site will be created using the site template you selected.

4) Congratulations! You have now created a new WSS site collection which includes a top-level site created from the template you selected.

Configure Sharepoint Server on Laptop/Desktop

Configure Sharepoint Server on Laptop/Desktop

So here is the problem. You are a sharepoint developer and you want to install Windows SharePoint services(WSS) on your desktop/laptop. Since we can install WSS only on a server so I will give you some quick tips to create a SharePoint development environment quickly.

1)First you will need Desktop/Laptop with atleast 2GB RAM with windows XP/Vista/7 installed.

2)Download a virtual server (Microsoft or VMware).

3)Download a Server operating system (Windows 2003 or Windows 2008).

4)Download Windows SharePoint services 3.0 with service pack2.

5)Download Visual studio 2008 professional version.

Once you have downloaded all the above software you are ready to start the process of creating the sharepoint environment.

1)Install Virtual Server. Once Virtual server is installed Virtual Machine should be created. On this Virtual machine windows server operating system should be installed.

2)Once the windows server installation is complete then install Visual studio 2008 professional and Windows SharePoint Services on the virtual machine just created.

That's it now you are all set to create you first SharePoint site.

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Important downloads for Sharepoint and .NET developers

Important downloads for Sharepoint and .NET developers

If you want to try out the full version of Visual Studio 2008 then you can use the below link to download it directly from Microsoft's website.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/d/81d3f35e-fa03-485b-953b-ff952e402520/VS2008ProEdition90dayTrialENUX1435622.iso

For sharepoint developers, to download Windows sharepoint services 3.0 with service pack 2 go to the below link:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7006

To download Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Sharepoint visit the below url: 
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=21082

Microsoft has launched Sharepoint Foundation 2010 for 64 bit machines. If you want to develop Sharepoint applications on a 64 bit laptop/Desktop with Windows Vista/7 installed then try Sharepoint foundation 2010:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5970


To start the development you will need Visual Studio 2010. The evaluation version of this can be downloaded from the below url:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/try


There are very interesting training materials provided by Microsoft for learning framework 4.0 technology and Visual Studio 2010. This Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23507