David Underwood’s Professional Blog

Let’s say that you’ve created a custom list in SharePoint 2007 and now you want the columns that you’ve added to be available when a new item is created or when items are edited. How do you go about doing this?

Open your list settings. Click on “Advanced Settings” under the “General Settings” section. From there ensure that “Allow management of content types?” is set to “Yes” and click OK. Back at your general list settings page you can now see a heading for “Content Types.” Click your content type (in my case “Project”) and you will see a listing of the columns available for the content type. Under the “Columns” heading you can click the link “Add from existing site or list columns” and add in your custom columns. These columns will now appear in your new item and edit forms!

Overview of the Business Data Catalog

The Sharepoint Business Data Catalog, or BDC for short, is an easy way to use builtin web part support to connect to and analyze data from multiple database managementsystems. The two I have worked with using BDC are SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g.

In addition to the build in business data web parts in Sharepoint 07 such asbusiness data list and business data item some have created custom web parts to consumeBDC data and present it graphically.
An example is the BDC Mapper web part that will display BDC data via a map interface.A neat blog entry is posted where we can use Nick’s version from Lightning Tools ormake our own. (readit here) 

We can also create our own custom web parts and use BDC Application Definitions topresent data in any custom format we wish without having to do all the overhead ofconnecting to the datasource.

Application Definitions

In order to use the BDC you must create an Application Definition. This is an XMLfile that describes your data source, how to connect to it, and the various queries,actions, and filters to display and sort the data. This can be created in three wayscurrently: (1) by hand, not fun (2) using BDC Meta Man or Microsoft BDC DefintionEditor or another third party tool (3) a combination of 1 and 2, my favorite.
Although BDC Meta Man is great and seems much easier to use than Microsoft’s toolit is also very costly for the Professional version ($1200 at this writing). Althoughthere is a free version it allows for very little. You can add only two tables (entities)and cannot add views. The best solution for me was to use both of the previously mentionedtools to model my data and then combine code manually to get what I really wanted.I edited the final XML in Dreamweaver. This is also a good way to start in order tolearn the XML required instead of having a generator create it all for you.

Sites to Learn

I would write an article here about getting started with the BDC but I’ve found severalsites that are great for learning and I used them myself to get started. When I havea bit more time I will blog more about the BDC and create a tutorial.

MikeBosch has a great video tutorial on using BDC Meta Man to connect to SQL and createan Application Definition file

Probablyone of the best and most extensive tutorials is one I found on Winsmarts.com.Sahil takes us through all aspects of creating the XML Definition file from scratchand gives a full understanding of what is required.

MSDN hasa large amount of information on the subject, go figure

Tools of Interest

BDC MetaMan from Lightning Tools

Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor is FREE and available in the Sharepoint2007 SDK (getit here)

XMLNotepad from Microsoft

Dreamweaver CS3 was also very helpful

Questions

Should you have any questions feel free to drop me a line through comments.

Open a command window

Change directory to x:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web serviceextensions\12\bin where x is your install drive

Run: stsadm –o deletessp –title “Shared Service Name” -force

You should get “Operation completed successfully.” after success.

If you are interested in SharePoint 2007 and installing it on Windows Server 2008you will find this article I wrote useful.
It is available as a PDF download due to the included screenshots. In 30 steps youcan have Sharepoint up and running on your Windows 2008 Server.

Sharepoint2007_Server08_InstallGuide.pdf(1.52 MB)

By default event handlers are only active for the document management of SharepointServer 2003. Using workarounds some event handling for lists can be created but onlywith a lot of work.

Event handlers allow certain actions (database, filesystem, etc) to be attached toan event (such as a file upload, status change, etc) that occurs in Sharepoint.

Sharepoint 2007 (v3) brings with it many new features. Among these features we findenhanced event handler support. Channel 9 Forums has a very nice post on SharepointServices 3 and Event Handlers including a video.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=197655

I ran into an issue today where Microsoft Sharepoint would not send alert messagesfor users who had subscribed to alerts. This was a new sharepoint setup so it wasmy assumption that something wasn’t configured correctly.

First e-mail would not send when adding new users. In this case it is necessary togo to Sharepoint Central Administration (running on a port other than 80 on your IISinstance). (1) Click “Configure virtual server settings” under “Virtual Server Configuration”(2) Click the name fo your virtual server (3) Under “Virtual Server Management” click”Virtual Server e-mail settings” (4) Enter your details and then click OK

The next problem I ran into was that the server sent out new user notification messagesbut would not send out alerts when users subscribed. The ASP.NET sharepoint applicationwas sending out the new user alerts but I found the Sharepoint Timer Service actuallysent out the alerts. In checking I found 2 things can cause the Timer Service notto be able to send messages for the alerts. (1) The account the Timer Service runsunder (Network Service by default) does not have access to the sharepoint site database.(2) The Timer Server cannot send mail through the SMTP server supplied.

Of course item 1 can be resolved by setting appropriate database permissions. Item2 however requires a bit more work as there are several reason why the server cannotsend mail through the SMTP server. These reason could be…

(1) Your SMTP server is not the server sharepoint is running on and does not allowrelay permission from the sharepoint server
(2) Anti-Virus software or Anti-Spam software on the mail server is blocking yourconnection or holding your message. Microsoft has a bulletin on this with regard toMcafee.
(3) You have a version of Outlook prior to Outlook 2003 installed on your sharepointmachine. This can cause errors. Uninstall Outlook or upgrade to Outlook 2003.
(4) This was the error I was having: You haveentered a server name for the main server in the Sharepoint Virtual Server configurationthat the Timer Service cannot contact. In my situation I entered MYMAILSERVER whichwas the network server name but that was not resolving for the Timer Service. Enteringthe mail server IP address solved the issue.

So as you can see there are many reasons why your Sharepoint installmight fail in sending alerts. If anyone finds any additonal tips they’d like to sharepost up in the comments.