Executing a SSIS Package from SharePoint 2010

March 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

In this post I will talk about how you can create a SharePoint list that will kick off SSIS packages. This interface will allow certain end users to have some access to package execution;  it is much cleaner than having a business user log into a database to manually kick off a job.

Creating the SQL table
The package execution history will be stored in a simple table comprising of two columns: PackageName and LastExecuted.

The table

If the user wants to rerun a specific package they will zero out the LastExecuted column. Doing so will kick off a trigger that executes sp_start_job. Below you will find the syntax for the trigger. Read more of this post

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SharePoint 2010 FBA and Claims

November 9, 2011 by 1 Comment

Slalom Consulting Justin Fentress

Slalom Consultant Justin Fentress specializes in designing and developing SharePoint and .NET solutions.

Background
For one of my clients, the need arose the have an implementation of SharePoint 2010 be externally available to allow access to both internally authenticated and externally authenticated users. Without spending a lot of time diving into the requirements, the implementation entailed the SharePoint farm living on an external domain; Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) was setup to allow access to internal users, and Forms Based Authentication (FBA) was implemented to authenticate external users.

While ADFS is not the focus of this blog and, while I was not involved in its implementation, I will say that from my understanding it is simply a link to a specified activity directory, with some limitations. And what I mean by limitations is: Read more of this post

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Turning Quick Launch into a Tab control

October 17, 2011 by 1 Comment

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman specializes in .NET, SharePoint, and Silverlight solutions and has experience in the Financial Services, Software, and Utilities and Energy sectors.

First, let me start this post by saying that I absolutely love that navigation in SP2010 is completely standard HTML. This is a ‘codeless’ method for turning that left navigation quick launch in to a nifty tab control. The use case for this was that for some landing pages people wanted tabs rather than quick launch but for everything else the normal quick launch. So how do you change the quick launch as needed to tabs? The answer is pretty simple.

Before we get into the details of how to build this, let’s take a step back and look at what the quick launch HTML looks like: Read more of this post

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Using Vermeer Content Types and Impersonation to handle SharePoint Document Uploads

May 13, 2011 by 2 Comments

Slalom Consultant Marc Schuricht

Slalom Consultant Marc Schuricht is a Denver based software Solution Architect with over 12 years of professional experience in IT projects ranging from configuration and change management to custom enterprise application development.

I had an interesting request from a client today. I am maintaining an existing project that has been in production for a few years now. This is one of those situations where I have a limited budget and time and also I cannot fundamentally change the overall process. These caveats aside, nothing out of the ordinary, but interesting nonetheless.

First a little background.

This project involves a simple approval workflow that controls routing and notifications for documents being placed into two document libraries. Furthermore, an out of the box SharePoint task list collects and manages workflow tasks.  When approved, an event receiver on the task list for the workflow routes documents to the “Approved” document library, otherwise, it routes them to the “Further Review” document library. Then, when a document is added to either library, a new workflow is automatically initiated– remember the caveats above. This workflow adds another task to the task list to be evaluated by the event receiver. This time, the event receiver on the task list sends an email to the original document submitter notifying them that they either need to review the document, and make changes, or it was successfully submitted.

Keep in mind this was working, until…. Read more of this post

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SharePoint Saturday Atlanta 2011

April 26, 2011 by Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Brendon Schwartz

Brendon Schwartz is a Slalom Principal Consultant based in Atlanta who specializes in SharePoint, social computing, and collaboration. He's a published author, and seasoned conference speaker.

Please join myself and three of my colleagues who will be presenting at SharePoint Saturday Atlanta on Saturday, May 7, 2011 (click here to register). It’s free and open to everyone with an interest in SharePoint.  Part of being a Slalom Consultant is giving back and our entire team hopes you will join us at local community events like these.

Here are the topics we are going to be discussing:

  • SharePoint 2010 Content Sizing and Planning
  • Win the Project: the ROI of SharePoint
  • Leveraging Sandbox Solutions for Fame and Fortune
  • Add InfoPath to your recipe book

My session is going to cover SharePoint 2010 Content Sizing and Planning. I’ll be looking at the different scenarios that many enterprise companies face when setting up a SharePoint 2010 solution.  I will cover some SharePoint scenarios  and look at how to make good planning choices when planning your content databases and what size you can expect.  This “how to” presentation will look at Read more of this post

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Office Web Apps Image Generation

April 13, 2011 by 1 Comment

Slalom Consultant Brett Hovenkotter

Slalom Consultant Brett Hovenkotter has extensive experience as a Development Team Lead across a broad range of methodologies, technologies and architectures.

In 2010 Microsoft brought its largest business to the Cloud with Office Web Apps. Aside from Microsoft’s hosted version that is available to everyone, Office Web Apps can be installed on your own Windows Server environment.

On a recent project my team was building a SharePoint 2010 site that would host a number of files that users can download, including Word and PowerPoint documents. The client had a requirement that the site display thumbnails of the first page or slide of these files. Fortunately, Office Web Apps supplies an API to generate images from Office files. You can download the specifications for the Web Handlers for Word and PowerPoint from MSDN.

First you have to call the Mobile Doc Handler which is a simple ASHX and returns an XML document that contains the data you need to generate the images. The URL will look something like this when integrated with SharePoint:

http://example.com/SiteName/_layouts/MobileDocHandler.ashx?doc=/SiteName/DocumentList/Document.docx

The resulting XML will look something like this: Read more of this post

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The Mysteries Behind Aligning Visio Images

February 27, 2011 by Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig

Slalom Consultant Marek Koenig specializes in Business Intelligence, SharePoint & Custom Development.

A colleague of mine recently reminded me of an issue I ran into when building out a dashboard with Visio. He was having issues aligning Visio charts with other web parts; It appeared that when a Visio web part was used on a page, it would have an arbitrary amount of canvas space around the image. He had seemingly tried everything, except for starting over.

I had this exact same issue, and it almost drove me mad figuring out what I could do to fix it. I attempted to change several properties on the web part itself, such as: Overriding the Web Drawing’s default initial view; disabling zooming; and, disabling panning. Then just for the heck of it, I open up Visio itself and think I might have some luck there.

First things first, I save the file. To my surprise the canvas area changes once again, but this time it at least looks a little bit familiar. I switch back to Visio and I notice that layout in the web part matches exactly the layout in Visio. It seems that the vdw holds onto some view state information. This makes no sense to me, but I test out my hypothesis by scrolling up in Visio and Read more of this post

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SharePoint Search with Pagination

February 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman specializes in .NET, SharePoint, and Silverlight solutions and has experience in the Financial Services, Software, and Utilities and Energy sectors.

by Maarten Sundman

This is an example class for showing how to search SharePoint with paging support in the API. This function accepts a string containing the standard SharePoint SQL style search query:

ie: SELECT TOP 50 AccountName, Size, Rank, Path, Title, Description, Write FROM portal..scope() WHERE “scope” = ‘People’ AND CONTAINS (“LastName”,’”Doe”‘)   ORDER BY “AccountName” DESC

To page you can use the optional int rowCount and page overloads. Whenever page is specified it judges the start row as rowCount*page. So page 10 begins at row 500 if rowCount is 50. Read more of this post

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Using Native SharePoint Form Fields

February 21, 2011 by Leave a comment

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman specializes in .NET, SharePoint, and Silverlight solutions and has experience in the Financial Services, Software, and Utilities and Energy sectors.

by Maarten Sundman

When making a generic web part for modifying or interacting with different SharePoint data you can’t always predict the column data type before hand.

The best way to make sure your web part works regardless of what data is being tossed in to it is to just use the out of box SharePoint Form Field control. This control goes ahead and grabs the column edit and display templates depending on the state you specify.

Below is a code snippet example of how to use this control. Takes a lot of the headache out when dealing with unknown data types/building generic web parts.

Read more of this post

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Data View Web Part Tricks

February 18, 2011 by 3 Comments

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman

Slalom Consultant Maarten Sundman specializes in .NET, SharePoint, and Silverlight solutions and has experience in the Financial Services, Software, and Utilities and Energy sectors.

by Maarten Sundman

One of the most handy out of the box customization components in my opinion is the Data View Web Part, but mucking around in XSLT can be a pain at times so here’s some reference points for making things easier, these work with SharePoint 2007/2010 and anything else that can use XSLT.

The first snippet is for pulling unique values down from your data source initially. The second is the much more fun way to make it so the DVWP filter drop downs are unique per column. The filter drop down unique value code snippet is put in to the template and is field type independent. Next we have an XSLT template for changing a string to be all uppercase to make a query comparison case-insensitive effectively, it can also be used for always showing a field as uppercase.

I also pasted some of my older XSLT tidbits related to truncated strings for Read More links and proper string extraction for rendering url and image fields. Read more of this post

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