Architecting Connected Systems Blog
I'm pleased to announce, SharePoint Filter for SharePoint 2010. Tired of people typing in bad words into their User Profile and Metadata Term sets? Try SharePoint Filter!
Implemented as a SharePoint Service Application, SharePoint filter has some pretty awesome features. Check it out and download it today:
http://www.sharepointfilter.com/
I built this after doing these two posts:
Chris
I'm proud to announce that I am getting out of the course ware development cage and that I have a couple of speaking engagements in the next couple of months. The first is #SPSLA (SharePoint Saturday LA) this Saturday Sept 18th. I'll be speaking on:
I will also be speaking at SharePoint Palooza in Seattle, WA on Oct 15th, 2010. I'll be speaking on:
Hope you can join me for these two great events!
Chris
At our SanSpug.org meeting for August I had some very intelligent questions asked of me. Ones I didn't know the answer too, until now! Here's the questions:
Very interesting questions, and my default answer would be to say that publishing is nothing more than automating the "Creation" of content types, and therefore, all previous rules will apply here. Let's take a look at the basics.
Basic #1: Does a list get updates of a content type?
ANSWER: A list will only get the items updated if you set the "Update all content types inheriting from this type?" radio button to TRUE!
Basic #2: Does an exported list to a new site collection keep the content type?
ANSWER: Yes! The content type will in fact move to the new site collection and be assigned to the newly created list!
CTHub #1: Does a list get updates of a content type via a Managed Content Hub?
ANSWER:
Yes! This implies that the "Update all
content types inheriting from this type?" radio button to TRUE!
CTHub #2: What happens if you create a list template and move the list to another site collection, then update the Content Type in the hub?
ANSWER: The newly created list WILL get the updates from the hub as long as the site collection is located inside the same web application.
CTHub #3: What happens when you publish a content type with the same name as one already existing?
ANSWER: The content type will not be updated, the Content Type Publishing logs will display an "Exists" error.
Enjoy!
Chris
So what exactly does this thing do anyway other than keep growing HUGE?!? Let's take a look! A little background…I have been running SharePoint 2010 RTM since it was released and since then the Logging database has grown to 500MB. The database itself seems to be dynamic in that you will start off with a small number of tables, but as your increase your feature usage, more tables will be added.
Question #1: Just how many tables does your system have? Here's my current list (but you may have even more!):
All of those of course have their partitions to them.
Question #2: What the hell is a partition and why do I have 32 of them?
You will see that there are a max number of 31 partitions. But you will also notice that there is a partition number 0. That is 32 days of partitions? I think this is a bug in the stored procedures when the table partitions get created. But the idea is to keep the set of daily information broken apart via a rolling schedule (this means that day 9 may not map to the calendar day 9). You can look at the Configuration table to find what the current partition is. As the Timer Job is run to process the log data, it will move to the next partition and recycle as it goes.
Question #3: How do I turn the freakin thing off?
This can be accomplished by going into Central Administration->Monitoring->Configure usage and health data collection. Uncheck the "Enable usage data collection" checkbox and the "Enable health data collection" checkbox
Question #4: I like the data, but there is too much, how do I shrink it?
If you explore the Stored procedures in the database, you will see that it simply truncates when it moves to a new partition. You can do the same by looping through all the tables and truncating the tables. You can also just run the function called "fn_TruncateUnusedPartitionsHelper"
Question #5: I like the data that is generated, can I please have some more?
Hell yeah you can, if you explore the timer jobs titled "Diagnostic Data Provider*" you will see they are disabled! Turn them on and you will get even more data around:
Ayman has a nice post on how you can use .NET Reflector to get in and see how these monsters do there dirty work here
Question #6: Can you have too much data?
Oh yeah! You can easily hit the 4GB limit on this database, for those of you running SQL Express (why?), you will be truncating tables quite frequently! For those of you with limited disk space, get ready to also be truncating tables. Those of you with HUGE disk arrays, well…you should be fine.
Question #7: Where is this documented schema thing I have seen so many marketing slides about?
Who the heck knows! It seems that anyone and any application is able to write to this thing. Even you could write into it with your own application. I'm not sure how you get a new set of partition tables setup and the attributes created, but eventually I will find some time to build something for it 🙂
Enjoy!
Chris
I'm sure all of you have seen the new tagging feature of SharePoint. This particular feature is a part of the User Profile Service Application AND Metadata Service Applications. If you don't have one of these created, then you simply won't get the ability to do tagging. If you do however, you can tag things as a generic "I Like It" or something more specific like "Awesome". I have had a few different questions asked of me over the past few months and here I'll answer them all:
#1 If a user tags something, will other users see the tag?
ANSWER: Depends! There is a checkbox when you attempt to tag an item. If you check it, it will save the tag specifically for you and no one else. If you do not check the box, then when some goes to tag the same item, you will see a suggested tag list made up of all tags that have been placed on that item.
#2 If a user tags something, will they see that tag indexed in a search for the item?
ANSWER: No, I have not gotten SharePoint or FAST Search to index the tags 🙁 This can certainly be setup with a custom iFilter or extend point in FAST Search content processing pipeline, but it doesn't look to be out of the box.
#3 As an administrator, how can I search on all the tags that have been created?
Tags are saved as Metadata terms in the Managed Metadata Service Application that is assigned to the web application you are working with. You can simply view all the terms under the "System->Keywords" group of your MMS service application. You can also run the following query on your MMS database to get a listing of the tags and who "tagged" it:
SELECT
[ObjectUniqueId]
,[ObjectId]
,[Label]
,[Owner]
,[CreatedTime]
,[LastModifiedTime]
FROM [ECMChangeLog] ecl, ECMTerm t, ECMTermLabel etl
where
ChangeType = 1
and
ecl.ObjectUniqueId = t.UniqueId
and
ecl.ObjectId = etl.TermId
#4 How do I query what has been tagged?
ANSWER: All items that have been tagged are not stored in MMS, but instead in the UserProfileServicesApplication_SocialDB_* database and in the SocialTags table. A simple query of that table will give you what you are looking for. Other helpful tables include:
#5 Are tags filtered (as in bad words like *bleep*)?
ANSWER: No, and ForeFront doesn't filter them either (reference this post).
#6 Can tags be filtered?
ANSWER: To answer this question, one must analyze the architecture of the tagging system. Since all the tag keywords are stored with MMS, the question then becomes, can I filter MMS? Looking at the structure of the MMS tables, we have:
The value for the term is actually stored in the ECMTermLabel property table. Check out my new product that does SharePoint Social Filtering : http://www.sharepointfilter.com
#7 What does the "Tag Cloud" web part do?
Being that SharePoint doesn't have any filtering…this web part can cause some pretty nasty HR problems. As long as your users are doing what they are suppose to be doing, then this simply queries all the tags in the Metadata store and displays them.
Enjoy!
Chris
When installing PowerPivot in your farm, you will have to manually add the following line to your web.config SafeControls section of EVERY front end server, you will also have to add this back everytime you make a change via the Web Application settings page in Central Administration:
<SafeControl Src="~/_layouts/powerpivot/*" IncludeSubFolders="True" Safe="True" AllowRemoteDesigner="True" SafeAgainstScript="True" />
If you don't do this, then you will get this error:
“The referenced file ‘/_layouts/PowerPivot/ReportGalleryView.ascx’ is not allowed on this page."
This should have been done in the Solution install, but they missed that step. Hopefully next version of the .wsp will contain the addition
Special thanks to PowerPivotGeek.com for the helpful hint
Chris
What I believe to be a new change to SharePoint 2010 is the addition of some error checking around Regional Settings and indexed columns in lists. When you try to change the regional settings and sort order to something with a different collation type (sorting based on a-Z0-9, or 'a' is bigger than 'A' type of stuff), you will get an error about the indexed columns. Being that I have turned on all site and site collection features, several lists have been created with indexed columns.
Moral of the story is, you MUST set the sort order of the site FIRST, before you add any indexed columns and turn on any site and site collection features. If you don't, then you are in for a few hours of work to remove them and then add them all back!
Chris
In working with the document id service in one of my labs I found some interesting "features" of this new SharePoint 2010 feature.
Document ID Service has a ways to go, but it will get there!
Chris
Another interesting feature I have found with column and list validation. This feature works as described, but unfortunately only for NEW items. If you enable column or list validation AFTER items have been added to a list, you will get an annoying error telling you the item was updated previously.
This does not happen on a new item addition. Basically this means you have to create all your columns and validation BEFORE you start adding any items to that list/library!
Chris
I was doing a demo today around SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows and found a bug in the design. When you create a workflow and want to edit the xoml file for the workflow, you must check it out. Why would you do that you ask? Well, the Designer Interface is far from perfect and you may need to move a step around in case you didn't realize you started to sub-nest your steps. The only way to do this is to edit the .xoml file. In order to edit the .xoml file, you must "Check Out" the file first. After you check it out, you can then edit the file in Designer via the XML Editor.
Saving the file but not "Checking It Back in" will cause the file to lose resolution to the SharePoint workflow code. This will cause the following error in the log files:
System.ArgumentNullException: Array cannot be null. Parameter name: bytes at System.Text.Encoding.GetString(Byte[] bytes) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPNoCodeXomlCompiler.CompileBytes(Byte[] xomlBytes, Byte[] rulesBytes, Boolean doTestCompilation, String assemblyName, SPWeb web, Boolean forceNewAppDomain)
Checking the file back in will allow the workflow to execute again.
RESOLUTION: A check out should cause the workflow to be unpublished. You would then need to save and publish it again after check in