Nishant Rana's Weblog

Writing custom properties for web parts in Sharepoint

For adding custom properties to our web part we need to do the following

1) Create property.

2) Decorate the property with the following attributes

WebBrowsable – To allow your property to be visible within SharePoint.

WebDisplayName– To provide display name to the property.

WebDescription– To provide description for that property.

Personalizable – To define the scope of it i.e either User or Shared through PersonalizationScope enumeration.

Let’s take a simple example wherein we have 2 properties defined, user will enter value for them and finally when the web part is rendered, we would be displaying their sum within the web part.

namespace AdditionWebPart

{

public class SumWebPart : WebPart{

private int firstVariable;

[WebBrowsable(true),

WebDisplayName(“First Value”),

WebDescription(“Enter value for first variable”),

Personalizable(PersonalizationScope.User)]

public int FirstVariable

{

get { return firstVariable; }

set { firstVariable = value; }

}

private int secondVariable;

[WebBrowsable(true),

WebDisplayName(“Second Value”),

WebDescription(“Enter value for second variable”),

Personalizable(PersonalizationScope.User)]

public int SecondVariable

{

get { return secondVariable; }

set { secondVariable = value; }

}

protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer){

writer.Write(“The total is “ +this.calcTotal(this.firstVariable,this.secondVariable));

}

private int calcTotal(int a, int b){

return a + b;

}}}

Put the following attribute in your assemblyinfo.cs file

[assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers]

Strong sign the assembly and install it in GAC.

Open the web.config of your site where you want this webpart

Make a safecontrol entry within the web.config for your webpart.

The name of the assembly,it’s version, culture and public key token information can be found by right clicking the assembly within gac and selecting properties.

Bye….

Creating a custom hello world SharePoint web part

1) Create a new class library project.

2) Add reference to system.web.dll

3) Inherit the following class

System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart class.

4) Override the Render method.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.Web.UI;

namespace MyWebPart

{

public class MyFirstWebPart : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart

{

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)

{

writer.Write(“<font name=’Georgia’><b>Hello World </b></font>”);

}

Put the following attribute in your assemblyinfo.cs file

[assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers]

5) Strong sign the assembly and install it in GAC.

6) Open the web.config of your site.

7) Make a safecontrol entry within the web.config for your webpart.

The name of the assembly,it’s version, culture and public key token information can be found by right clicking the assembly within gac and selecting properties.

Or to get the public key token you can open the .NET Framework command prompt and type the following command sn -t “assemblyname.dll”

We can deploy assembly in the bin directory of the web application also, but in this case it would be partially trusted and could result in security exception which could have been unhandled, so we need to make the following change in the web.config of the application

Go to webparts gallery within your site, click on new, select your webpart and populate the gallery.

That’s it!!

Update in pre update plugin in CRM

In previous version i.e. 3.0 on updating certain field in pre/post update used to lead to circular reference.

The only way to update in case of crm 3.0 was to modify the entityxml recieived as ref parameter for preUpdate event handler.

In CRM 4.0 to do the same we can add/update the properties passed as inputparameters to the context for pre-update.

public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)
{
DynamicEntity entity = (DynamicEntity)context.InputParameters.Properties[“Target”];
if (entity.Name == EntityName.lead.ToString())
{

// firstname and lastname are already properties of the entity which are not null and

// therefore are passed as inputparamters

String firstName = “Nishant”;
entity.Properties[“firstname”] = firstName;

String lastName = “Rana”;
entity.Properties[“lastname”] = lastName;

//or setting a value of a field whose value is null i.e. not passed as inputparameter
StringProperty subject = new StringProperty(“subject”, “Test Subject”);
entity.Properties.Add(subject);

}
}

The above plugin is registered for lead’s pre-update event.

Using service.update would lead to “server is unable to process the request error” as it automatically checks for the circular reference, if the crmService has been created using context.CreateCrmService() method.

For CRM 3.0 refer this wonderful article

http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=Callout2

Bye…

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Setuser failed because of one of the following reasons: the database principal does not exist, its corresponding server principal does not have server access, this type of database principal cannot be impersonated, or you do not have permission.

We got this error while executing our plugin. Within plugin we were making sql call to fileteredViews.

For impersonation we were making use of SETUSER keyword.

The plugin was working fine in development and test server. But started giving the error in case of Production.

We replaced SETUSER with EXECUTE AS USER and everything was fine than.

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/05/21/writing-crm-callouts-with-filtered-views.aspx

Bye…

Configuration Information for Plugin

Instead of creating a separate .config file for saving configuration info, now we can specify the configuration information for a plugin while we are registering it.

We just need to create a constructer for the plugin class

public class SharingEntity : IPlugin
{

string lscTempId = “”;
string lsuTempId = “”;

public SharingEntity(string unsecureConfiguration, string secureConfiguration)
{
XmlDataDocument doc = new XmlDataDocument();
doc.LoadXml(secureConfiguration);

lscTempId = doc.SelectSingleNode(“//LeadSharingCreate”).InnerText;
lsuTempId = doc.SelectSingleNode(“//LeadSharingUpdate”).InnerText;

………………….

The config info is specified as following
<Config>
<LeadSharingCreate>8a08c5ec-b6cd-dd11-a48d-00164145e126</LeadSharingCreate>
<LeadSharingUpdate>88E6872C-B7CD-DD11-A48D-00164145E126</LeadSharingUpdate>
</Config>

We have put the above info in the Secure Configuration area of the plugin registration dialog box, while registering the Step.

“The unsecureConfiguration is made available to plug-ins invoked both on the server and in the outlook client.The secureConfiguration is more secure and is only passed to the plug-in when it executes on the server. The secure configuration allows you to keep the information from being distributed to client machines that might be less secure.”

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it- Sharepoint

Got this error while starting the full crawl on Local Office Sharepoint Server Sites (default content source)

The resolution for this was to add the following registry key

1) Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2) In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3) Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4) Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5) Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6) In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7) Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Bye…