Use SharePoint as Source for External Content Type

In SharePoint 2010 there are a lot of possible sources for External Content Types. Next to the default ones (WCF, Web Service, SQL), SP allows the creation of custom BDC Models using Visual Studio 2010. By using a custom Model you can use any source that you can access with Code.

In the following example, I will create a custom BDC Model for using a SharePoint List as a Source.

Create Visual Studio Project

1. Create a new Visual Studio Project of Type "Business Data Connectivity Model".

Note: Remember that SharePoint 2010 uses .NET Framework 3.5 and not 4

1. Enter the url and "Deploy as a farm solution"
2. Visual Studio will generate

• a Package, which is deployed to SharePoint
• a Feature, which is added to the Package
• a default BDC Model, a xml description of the Entity (There is also a visual editor)
• a default Entity, a code description of the Entity

Create xml Entity

Visual Studio knows 3 visual ways to adapt the xml Entity:

1. The BDC Designer enables you to define the entities in your model and to visually arrange their relationships with one another.
    
2. Use the BDC Method Details window to define the parameters, instances, and filter descriptors of a method.
   

   

3. The BDC Explorer displays the elements that make up the model.
    

Step 1

Remove all default created methods in the Method Details windows.

Step 2

Rename the Entity to "Customer"

Rename the default Identifier to anything that suits your needs, I decided to use the ItemID of type System.Int32. This field will hold the unique ItemID of any SharePoint Item.

Step 3

In the "BDC Method Details" view generate a "Specific Finder" Method for reading an item in the list. The parameters for the method will be automatically generated for you.

Step 4

Adapt the Customer TypeDescriptor in the BDC Explorer. Add TypeDescriptor fields for each field that you want to have in each customer entity e.g. FirstName (String), LastName (String) and of course the identifier ItemID (Integer).

Since ItemID is the field related to your identifier, you have to set additional properties for that TypeDescriptor:

• 'Identifier' Property -> select ItemID (the link to the identifier value in the entity)
• 'Read-only' Property -> set to True (since ItemID will be linked to the SharePoint ItemID in the source, we do not want the user to be able to change this value)

After adapting one Customer TypeDescriptor, these changes will be used for any newly generated method.

Step 5

Create methods for the other operations: 'Finder' (Read List), 'Creator' (Create Item), 'Updater' (Update Item) and 'Deleter' (Delete Item)

In the Create Method adapt the NewCustomer TypeDescriptor by removing the ItemID TypeDescriptor, since we don't want the user to be able to enter a value for this field.

Create Code Entity

In the Solution Explorer you can find a code file called "Entity1.cs". In this file the code is stored that links the fields defined in the xml entity to code fields.

Step 1

Create a property for each of the fields that you want to have for each customer. e.g.

public int ItemID { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; }

Create Code for Service

In the Solution Explorer you can find a code file called "CustomerService.cs". In this file the code is stored that reads the items from any source and stores them in BDC Entities.

Step 1

At the beginning of the class you will find the example methods, which were generated with the project. These can be deleted. Only keep the methods that have "throw
new System.NotImplementedException();" in their body.

Step 2

In my example I used the SharePoint Object Model for retrieving data from SharePoint. I generated a method that would create a Customer Entity on basis of a SharePoint List Item that contains the information about a Customer:

private static Customer generateCustomer(SPListItem customerItem) { Customer myCustomer = new Customer(); myCustomer.ItemID = customerItem.ID; myCustomer.FirstName = customerItem["First Name"].ToString(); myCustomer.LastName = customerItem["Last Name"].ToString(); return myCustomer; }

Step 3

Write the code for the different methods:

ReadItem(int itemID)	Customer myCustomer = null; using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com/personal/KS)){     using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb()) {         SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Contacts"];         if (oList != null) { SPListItem customerItem = oList.GetItemById(itemID); if (customerItem != null) { myCustomer = generateCustomer(customerItem); }         }     } } return myCustomer;
ReadList()	List<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>(); using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com/personal/KS)){ using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb()) { SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Contacts"]; foreach(SPListItem customerItem in oList.Items){ customers.Add(generateCustomer(customerItem)); } } } return customers;
Create(Customer newCustomer)	Customer returnCustomer = null; using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com/personal/KS)){ using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb()) { SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Contacts"]; SPListItem customerItem = oList.AddItem(); customerItem["First Name"] = newCustomer.FirstName; customerItem["Last Name"] = newCustomer.LastName; customerItem.Update(); SPListItem returnCustomerItem = oList.GetItemByID(customerItem.ID); if (returnCustomerItem != null) { returnCustomer = generateCustomer(returnCustomerItem); } } } return returnCustomer;
Update(Customer customer)	using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite(http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com/personal/KS)){ using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb()) { SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Contacts"]; SPListItem customerItem = oList.GetItemById(customer.ItemID); if (customerItem != null) { customerItem["First Name"] = customer.FirstName; customerItem["Last Name"] = customer.LastName; customerItem.Update(); } } }
Delete(int itemID)	using (SPSite oSite = new SPSite ("http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com/personal/KS")) { using (SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb()) { SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Contacts"]; SPListItem customerItem = oList.GetItemById(itemID); if (customerItem != null) { customerItem.Delete(); } } }

Note:

When writing this code file see the Best Practices for Error Handling: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff464398.aspx

Deploy

You can now deploy the project and create a new External List based on this BDC Model.

Note:

When trying to deploy a Business Data Connectivity Model with Visual Studio 2010 you might get the following error:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': Property 'SiteUrl' contains an invalid URL

Solution:

Add a property to the Feature.xml File:

<Properties>
<Property Key="SiteUrl" Value="http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com">
</Properties>

Accessing rows in repeating groups in Browser Enabled Forms

There are not so many differences in versions of XPath between regular forms and web enabled ones. But inability to reference rows in web enabled forms by the index is one of the most annoying.

1. The current row index expression:
   count(preceding-sibling::*[local-name() = "MyRepeatingGroup"])
   As you can see that formula successfully substitutes the position() function not available in web forms.
   
2. Accessing value of the previous row:
   preceding-sibling::my:MyRepeatingGroup[count(preceding-sibling::my:MyRepeatingGroup) = count(current()/preceding-sibling::my:MyRepeatingGroup) - 1]/my:FieldToAccess

Conditional Default Values in InfoPath

Sometimes you want the default value of a field to be dependent upon a condition. However, there isn't any direct functionality to support IF statements in the default values of fields. Substituting a rule for a default value only gets you so far, as the rule is only applied when that field that changes, not the fields that the rule depends on. Updating the field whenever any dependent field is changed would require you to copy the rule to each field. This is not very maintainable, so below I will describe two approaches to avoiding this.

The first approach is simple, but it has some limitations and caveats. The second approach is more complicated, but should work in all cases.

Method 1: Using the union and array indexer operators

The first approach is to use the union operator '|' along with an array indexer '[]' to select the proper value:

(TrueResult | ElseResult) [(BoolCondition) + 1]

There are two caveats to using this approach:

1. The node set will always be returned in document order. It does not matter what the order is in the parenthesis, as (field1 | field2) == (field2 | field1). Since you cannot change the node set ordering, you may have to modify your BoolCondition to be NOT-ed. For more information on document order, you can visit the w3.org page on XPaths.
   
2. Inside of the parenthesis, you must only have nodes; you cannot have strings or any other type. So (field1 | "hello world") will not work.
   

Method 2: Using concat, substring and string-length

To overcome these caveats, you can use the second approach here.  That is to use concat, substring and string-length.  For example, the same generic if statement from the previous approach converts to

concat(

substring(TrueResult, 1, (BoolCondition) * string-length(TrueResult)),

substring(ElseResult, 1, (not(BoolCondition)) * string-length(ElseResult)))

Uploading a Page Layout for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010

Step 1

Open Visual Studio and create a new C# project, using the "Empty SharePoint Project" template, listed under the SharePoint 2010 project templates. For this example, we'll name our project "MyCustomPageLayout".

For this example, we'll be deploying our solution as a "Sandboxed solution".

 

Click "Finish" to wire up your solution to your particular SharePoint site.

Step 2

As with SharePoint 2007, we'll need to provision our Page Layouts to our SharePoint Site Collection Master Page Gallery by using a "Module" element. To do this, right click on the Project and say you want to add a new item. Select "Module" from the list of SharePoint 2010 items.

  
We'll name the Module "masterpage". When you create the new module, you'll see something like this:

By default, the module contains a sample text file you, so you can see how the Module deploys a file to SharePoint. However, we don't need it, so we'll delete Sample.txt. Next, we need to wire up our module to point to the URL of the Master Page Gallery, so we'll add a "Url" attribute to the Module node. Our Elements.xml file should now contain this XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <Module Name="masterpage" Url="_catalogs/masterpage">
  </Module>
</Elements>

Step 3

Next, we're going to drop our new Page Layout file into the Module. To do this, we'll right-click on the "masterpage" module in the Visual Studio explorer and select "Add existing item". Browse to your Page Layout and select it.

Step 4

Next, we'll need to update the Module's Elements.xml file to tell SharePoint what to do with the new Page Layout.

The first thing we'll need to do is to update the "Url" property of the File element, by removing the "masterpage/" prefix fromt the Url. (Since we already specified in the Module element that we're deploying the Page Layout to the "masterpages" library, if we left the "masterpages/" part of the Url on the file, SharePoint would try to provision our Page Layout into a library called "masterpages" inside the existing "masterpages" library! We don't want that!) Your new File element should look like this:

<File Path="masterpage\MyCustomPageLayout.aspx" Url="MyCustomPageLayout.aspx" />

Now we need to specify some properties for the Page Layout. These properties are identical to the kind of properties you would specify for a Page Layout in SharePoint 2007:

• The Title of the file in SharePoint
  In our case, the file itself has a URL of MyCustomPageLayout.aspx, but we can also give the page a Title that will show up when the Page Layout is being selected by the content author, such as "My Custom Page Layout".
• The Content Type: All Page Layouts must inherit from the "Page Layout" content type (which we add using a Resource file value.)
• A Publishing Preview Image: The Publishing Preview Image is the image that shows up when a user picks that Page Layout from the Page Layout picker while they're creating a new page. In this example, we'll just point to the Article Page's preview image.
• The Publishing Associated Content Type: This is the Content Type that the Page Layout is representing, such as an "Article Page", "Welcome Page", etc. The value is a string representing a Lookup value that's a combination of the name of the Content Type and its unique identifier.

Our new File node will look like this:

<File Path="masterpage\MyCustomPageLayout.aspx" Url="MyCustomPageLayout.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
      <Property Name="Title" Value="My Custom Page Layout" />
      <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:cmscore,contenttype_pagelayout_name;" />
      <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/CustomPageLayout.png, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/CustomPageLayout.png" />
      <Property Name="PublishingAssociatedContentType" Value=";#$Resources:cmscore,contenttype_articlepage_name;;
#0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF3900242457EFB8B24247815D688C526CD44D;#"
/>
</File>

Please note, there's no line break inside the PublishingAssociatedContentType value string; I needed to add a line break so you could see the whole value here

That's it! We've built our Module.

Step 5

Now, we're going to add a module for the Page Layout preview image. Right click on the project and add an additional Module element. Delete the "Sample.txt" file from it, and add your new preview image. (In our case, we'll call it CustomPageLayout.png".) Modify your module file so it looks like this:

<Module Name="Previews Images" Url="_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images">
  <File Path="Preview Images\CustomPageLayout.png" Url="CustomPageLayout.png" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
      <Property Name="Title" Value="Custom Page Layout Preview Image" />
  </File>
</Module>

You might have noticed that a new Feature got created for you when you created a new Module. Let's rename the Feature itself MyCustomPageLayout in the project tree, like this:

 

Step 6

We'll open up our MyCustomPageLayout feature, and give it a helpful name and description. Notice that you can graphically see that your Module is a part of this Feature, and you can even see which Module files will be provisioned when the Feature is activated.

Step 7>

The last thing we need to do is to make sure our Solution Package is getting configured correctly, to include our new Feature.

By default, the "Empty SharePoint Project" will create a DLL for you. If we just went ahead and deployed our Solution Package with the settings as-is, we would be deploying a DLL to the GAC. However, since our solution doesn't have any code in it, it would be a blank DLL. That's a bit messy, so let's avoid that. Click on the Project in your Solution Explorer, and look in the Properties Window. Change the "Include Assembly in Package" property to "False".

Step 8

To deploy our new Solution Package to our Sandboxed Site, we'll go to the "Build" menu in Visual Studio, and select "Deploy MyCustomPageLayout".

 

This will assemble the Solution Package, deploy the Solution Package to the Sandbox, then activate the Sandboxed feature.

If we browse to our Master Page Library, we'll now see our new Page Layout. Note that, unlike SharePoint 2007, our Page Layout will appear checked out by default, if we haven't modified any of the approval or check-out settings of the out of the Master Page Gallery. We'll need to check it in and approve it for it to be available to us.

How to create a custom Page Layout using SharePoint Designer

Scenario:

You're working with the Enterprise Wiki Site Template and you don't really like where the "Last modified…" information is located (above the content). You want to move that information to the bottom of the page.

Option 1: Modify the "EnterpriseWiki.aspx" Page Layout directly.

Option 2: Create a new Page Layout based on the original one and then modify that one.

We'll go ahead and go with Option 2 since we don't want to modify the out of the box template just in case we need it later on.

How To:

Step 1

Navigate to the top level site of the Site Collection > Site Actions > Site Settings > Master pages (Under the Galleries section). Then switch over to the Documents tab in the Ribbon and then click New > Page Layout.

 

Step 2

Select the Enterprise Wiki Page Content Type to associate with, give it a URL and Title. Note that there's also a link on this page to create a new Content Type. You might be interested in doing this if you wanted to say, add more editing fields or metadata properties to the layout. For example if you wanted to add another Managed Metadata column to capture folksonomy aside from the already included "Wiki Categories" Managed Metadata column.

Step 3

SharePoint Designer time! Hover over your newly created Page Layout and "Edit in Microsoft SharePoint Designer."

Step 4

Now you can choose to build your page manually by dragging your SharePoint Controls onto the page and laying them out as you'd like…

… Or you can copy and paste the OOB Enterprise Wiki Page Layout. I think I'll do that.

Step 5

Alright, so you've copied the contents of the EnterpriseWiki.aspx Page Layout and now it's time for some customizing. I found the control I want to move, so I'll simply do a copy or cut/paste to the new spot.

Step 6

Check-in, publish, and approve the new Page Layout.

Step 7

Almost there! Navigate to your publishing site, in this case the Enterprise Wiki Site, then go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Page layouts and site templates (Under Look and Feel). Here you'll be able to make the new Page Layout available for use within the site.

Step 8

Go back to your site and edit the page that you'd like to change the layout for. On the Page tab of the Ribbon, click on Page Layout and select your custom Page Layout.

 
Et voila! You just created a custom Page Layout using SharePoint Designer 2010, re-arranged a SharePoint control and managed to plan for the future by not modifying the out of the box template. That was a really simple example but I hope it helped to give you some ideas on how else you can customize Page Layouts within SharePoint 2010!

Property 'SiteUrl' contains an invalid URL

When trying to deploy a Business Data Connectivity Model with Visual Studio 2010 you get the following error:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': Property 'SiteUrl' contains an invalid URL

Solution:

Add a property to the Feature.xml File:

<Properties>
    <Property Key="SiteUrl" Value="http://sp2010.tripleaconnected.com">
</Properties>

Useful SharePoint Links

1. Visual studio extensions
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7BF65B28-06E2-4E87-9BAD-086E32185E68&displaylang=en

2. SharePoint Manager (Codeplex)
http://spm.codeplex.com/

3. For Internal Field Names and CAML Queries:
http://www.u2u.be/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx

4. For Feature Deployment
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms414322.aspx
http://blogit.create.pt/blogs/andrevala/archive/2007/12/02/SharePoint-2007-Deployment_3A00_-Overview.aspx

5. For Layouts
http://www.heathersolomon.com/content/sp07cssreference.htm

6. STSADM Commands
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc948709.aspx

7. SharePoint NameSpace
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.aspx