Convert a WebPart Zone in MOSS into Accordion or Tabs Style Interface

This is a web part that turns all the visible web parts with a Title in a Zone into Tab or Accordion interface.  Just drop the webpart into a zone and see it convert all the visible webparts with a title in the zone  into part of Tab or Accordion.  It renders one tab/accordion menu per webpart.

Originally inspired by EasyTabs from PathToSharePoint but instead of embedding some JavaScript with Content editor web part, it’s a custom web part providing a property to control if it renders Tab or Accordion and JavaScript bit is done using jQuery.

Some customary screen shots!

WebPart Zone Converted into Tabs

WebPart Zone containing the TabAccordion WebPart in Edit mode

 

WebPart Zone converted into Accordion

 

WebPart Zone containing the TabAccordion WebPart in Edit mode

 

Properties of the WebPart

Download Full Source Code. Hopefully it’s commented just enough to understand what’s going on in the JavaScript.

WSP Solution can be downloaded from here. Once the package is deployed, Activate the Kark SharePoint Web Parts feature at Site Collection level and Tab Accordion web part will be available in the Web Part Gallery.

UPDATE
Have changed the JavaScript to render tabs at the top

Download WSP Here

Here is a screenshot

Please excuse the ugly looking Tabs, but hopefully CSS should be really easy to change

Created Date in SPListItemVersion does not respect locale settings?

A Quick post! On a recent project we had a custom control that was showing document version history information such as “Created By” and “Date Created” in a table format, it was looking all good. After the day light savings time (British Summer Time) one of the tester spotted a bug in document version history control where “Date Created” was still showing the GMT time, it looked like SPListItemVersion.Created was not respecting day light savings time.

TimeZone.xml looked good and every other Dates on the site were showing correct time. It turns out that SPListItemVersion.Created was only showing time in GMT (Don’t know why!) so a simple fix was to convert the time into local time at the render time.

lblDateCreated.Text = version.Created.ToLocalTime().ToString();

Various MOSS Enterprise Search Stuff – Part I

Recently I have been working on a large Content Management solution that required 300+ custom Managed/Metadata Properties in MOSS Search and had requirements to allow user to search on all of the Metadata Properties. MOSS Search Index was also used to run a number of reports such as “What Asset (Image, Video, Document etc) is used on what page?”

While working with MOSS Search I came across a number of things that I think are worth sharing.

Programmatically setting up Shared Scope

APIs to work with MOSS Search related Administration tasks such as creating Scopes, Managed Properties etc are very straight forward and well documented under Getting Started with the Enterprise Search Administration Object Model

But if you want to set up a shared scope, then it’s not very obvious from API how to do it. ScopeCollection.Create method as shown below takes owningSiteUrl as a parameter and to set up a shared scope just pass in null for owningSiteUrl and the scope will be created as a Shared Scope!

public Scope Create (
    string name,
    string description,
    Uri owningSiteUrl,
    bool displayInAdminUI,
    string alternateResultsPage,
    ScopeCompilationType compilationType
)

Programmatically setting up “Include values from a single crawled property based on order specified”

Programmatically setting up mappings to crawled properties is straight forward, if you want to add multiple crawled properties and include value only from a single crawled property based on the order than from the UI, you can simply check the radio button next “Include values from a single crawled property based on order specified”.

To do it programmatically add multiple Crawled properties to MappingCollection and then set ManagedProperty.RespectPriority property to true, here is some code (pseudo code really!) to add multiple crawled property mappings

                Schema propertiesSchema = new Schema(SearchContext.Current);
                ManagedPropertyCollection managedProperties = propertiesSchema.AllManagedProperties;
                ManagedProperty managedProperty = managedProperties["Test Property"];
                MappingCollection mappingCollection = managedProperty.GetMappings();

                //Create Crawled Property Mappings

                Mapping propMapping = new Mapping(new Guid("00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346"),
                                                 "ows_Modified_x0020_By",
                                                  "31",
                                                  managedProperty.PID);

                Mapping propMapping1 = new Mapping(new Guid("b725f130-47ef-101a-a5f1-02608c9eebac"),
                                                 "11",
                                                  "31",
                                                  managedProperty.PID);

                //Add in the order in which you want it to appear in the Admin UK
                mappingCollection.Add(propMapping);
                mappingCollection.Add(propMapping1);

                managedProperty.SetMappings(mappingCollection); // You have to do this for Mappings to work
                //Tell it to respect priority!
                managedProperty.RespectPriority = true;
                managedProperty.Update();

If you look at the Mapping object’s constructor below

public Mapping (
    Guid crawledPropset,
    string crawledPropertyName,
    int crawledPropertyVariantType,
    int managedPid
)

It takes a Guid (crawledPropset) which is the category of crawled property (SharePoint, People, etc) and also takes an int (crawledPropertyVariantType) which represents the DataType of crawled property, I find it annoying that list of possible values crawledPropset and crawledPropertyVariantType is not very handy so here are the possible values

Some Possible Values of crawledPropertyVariantType

Data Type	crawledPropertyVariantType
string	31
bool	11
integer	20
datetime	64
Something to do with Custom field	4127

*Please note that above values are what I have encountered till now *

Commonly Used crawledPropset

Category	crawledPropset
Sharepoint	00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346
Basic	0b63e343-9ccc-11d0-bcdb-00805fccce04
Mail	aa568eec-e0e5-11cf-8fda-00aa00a14f93
Office	f29f85e0-4ff9-1068-ab91-08002b27b3d9
People	00110329-0000-0110-c000-000000111146

Filtering by approval status in ContentByQueryWebPart

If you need to programmatically set properties on ContentByQueryWebPart to filter the data by approval status than FilterField is _ModerationStatus FilterType is ModState

webPart.FilterField1 = "_ModerationStatus";
webPart.FilterType1 = "ModStat";
webPart.FilterValue1 = "Approved";

Programmatically adding RSSAggregatorWebPart to a Page

I have been struggling to find information on how to add RSSAggregatorWebPart to a page. First I started with doing something like

RSSAggregatorWebPart rssViewer = new RSSAggregatorWebPart();
rssViewer.FeedUrl = "http://ketulpatel.wordpress.com/feed/";
rssViewer.ID = "rssFeed";
rssViewer.DataSourcesString = dataSourceString.ToString();
rssViewer.Title = "My Blog";
//AddWebPart is an helper method to add a webpart to a page
AddWebPart(web,rssViewer,"default.aspx","CenterColTop",0);

That added the web-part to the page but when rendering the Page, web part gave an error asking to check error logs for errors and error log under 12 hive contained following error

RssWebPart: Exception handed to HandleRuntimeException.HandleException System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: key at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.CacheObject.LoadDataFromCache(String key) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.BaseXmlDataSource.GetXmlDocument() at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart.GetHierarchicalDocument(IHierarchicalDataSource ds) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart.GetHierarchicalXPathNavigator(IHierarchicalDataSource ds) at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SingleDataSource.GetXPathNavigatorInternal() at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SingleDataSource.GetXPathNavigator() at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SingleDataSource.GetXPathNavigator(IDataSource datasource, Boolean origin…

Blha Blha….. Really could not tell what’s going on, but If I add the same web-part from the UI (Using the Web Part Gallery) than it worked fine and my feed showed up in the web-part. After examining the properties of the working web-part in the debug mode, I noticed the web part has DataSourceString and ParameterBindings property set, MSDN has no documentation about it (or at least I could not find it) and setting those properties when adding RSS WebPart programmatically worked

Here is the full code snippet

RSSAggregatorWebPart rssViewer = new RSSAggregatorWebPart();
rssViewer.FeedUrl = "http://ketulpatel.wordpress.com/feed/";
rssViewer.ID = "rssFeed";
StringBuilder dataSourceString = new StringBuilder("<%@ Register TagPrefix=\"WebControls\" Namespace=\"Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls\" Assembly=\"Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c\" %>");
            dataSourceString.Append("<%@ Register TagPrefix=\"WebPartPages\" Namespace=\"Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages\" Assembly=\"Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c\" %>");
            dataSourceString.Append("<WebControls:XmlUrlDataSource runat=\"server\" AuthType=\"None\" HttpMethod=\"GET\">");
            dataSourceString.Append("<DataFileParameters>");
            dataSourceString.Append("<WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name=\"RequestUrl\" ParameterKey=\"RequestUrl\" PropertyName=\"ParameterValues\"/>");
            dataSourceString.Append("</DataFileParameters>");
            dataSourceString.Append("</WebControls:XmlUrlDataSource>");

rssViewer.DataSourcesString = dataSourceString.ToString();
rssViewer.ParameterBindings = "<ParameterBinding Name=\"RequestUrl\" Location=\"WPProperty[FeedUrl]\"/>";
rssViewer.Title = "My Blog";
AddWebPart(web,rssViewer,"default.aspx","CenterColTop",0);

Value of DataSourceString is:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="WebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="WebPartPages" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<WebControls:XmlUrlDataSource runat="server" AuthType="None" HttpMethod="GET">
<DataFileParameters>
<WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="RequestUrl" ParameterKey="RequestUrl" PropertyName="ParameterValues"/>
</DataFileParameters>
</WebControls:XmlUrlDataSource>

Value of ParameterBindings is:

<ParameterBinding Name="RequestUrl" Location="WPProperty[FeedUrl]"/>