Samuel {n} Mensah

At this point Feature 1 is complete and we are ready to deploy to our sharepoint environment. You should have a solution explorer similar to this:

After you deploy, you can verify that everything worked by doing the following. Navigate to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site Collection Features. Search for the feature you deployed. You should find that it’s activated and working as expected.

The second thing we need to check is whether our master page was deployed or not. Navigate to  http://[RootSite]/_catalogs/master/Forms/AllItems.aspx in your browser. You should find that Test.master (or whatever the name you gave) is now visible and approved in our master page list.

At this point we have feature 1 fully working. We won’t stop here because we want this master page to be applied whenever a new site collection is provisioned. So we have to create our Stapler (Feature2) which will associate Feature1 with the site definition of My sites.

Step 3: Create Stapler Feature to associate Feature1 with a site Definition

Follows the same steps above to create another Feature called Feature 2. The scope of this feature should be set to Farm level.

Next add an empty element item called Elements.

Your Solution explorer should like this now

The next task is the most important since this involves associating feature with a site definition.

We will need the GUID from Feature1 . You can find this in the manifest.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation TemplateName="SPSMSITEHOST#0" Id="493a82e4-f05b-4244-91df-c99ba69db085"></FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation>
<FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation TemplateName="SPSPERS#0" Id="493a82e4-f05b-4244-91df-c99ba69db085"></FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation>

</Elements>

Two lines of code were added to make the association between feature and site defintion. The site definition id is encapsulated in the templatename [SPSMITEHOST#0 & SPSPERS#0].

We’ve now successfully created our feature and stapler. Deploy this to your SharePoint instance to see this in action.

This is a really simple code snippet to obtain the current user using the SharePoint object model.

using (SPWeb spweb = SPContext.Current.Web) {
SPUser oUser = spweb.CurrentUser;
string Username = oUser.LoginName;
}

SPUser represents a user in SharePoint services. A new object (oUser) is created from the spweb property, currentUser. We can now access various other properties like LoginName, Name etc.

SPlinq allows you to write strongly typed queries against lists. Here are some key points to note:

• SharePoint 2010 exposes list data through a REST service that you can consume in your projects.
• The WCF data service SharePoint exposes is ListData.svc. eg http://sp2010dev/_vti_bin/listdata.svc 
• You will need the ADO.NET client runtime installed on your machine
• In order to use the objects returned by listdata.svc service, we’ll need to generate entity classes for the list of objects returned by that service. You can do this by using SPMetal or adding a service reference to your project.

After adding a service reference , include the ff references in your project:

using System.Net;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq

You’re now ready to write a simple program. We want to create a webpart which will display a list of events only created by a particular user.

In the page_Load of our visual webpart we create a new data context by specifiying a URI and credentials by which we will be connecting to the list data.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
		{

			var builder = new StringBuilder();
			var context = new POPDataContext(new Uri("http://sp2010dev/_vti_bin/listdata.svc"))
							  {
								  Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials

							  };

Next we retrieve the username of the current user and strip away some default characters in the string. The query below then simple selects all events which were created by that user. We loop through all the results and assign them to a string which we display in our label.

SPUser currentUser = SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser;
			String activeDirectoryUsername = currentUser.LoginName;

			activeDirectoryUsername = activeDirectoryUsername.Substring(3);

var users =context.PopEvents.Where(b => b.CreatedBy.UserName.Equals(activeDirectoryUsername))
                                                .Select(b => new { b.Title,
                                                                   Username = b. CreatedBy.UserName
                                                                  });

foreach (var userInformationListItem in users)
			{
				builder.AppendFormat("{0} posted by {1}", userInformationListItem.Title,
									 userInformationListItem.Username);
				builder.AppendFormat("<br />");
			}

			uxVacationRequests.Text = builder.ToString();

		}

 Output:

I recently ran into this error which working on a custom page.

Sharepoint: Cannot convert type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ScriptLink’
to ‘System.Web.UI.IAttributeAccessor’

Whenever you copy a master page from one site to another in SharePoint designer, it converts certain tags to script. The solution is to cut and paste your code into a new masterpage file.

Source: http://www.hexanes.com/?p=448

While working on an internal project recently, I was tasked to implement feature stapling which would enable us to load a custom master page to the My Site (specifically My Content) section. Before we jump into all the details I would like to define some terms just in case there are newbies (like me) who had no idea about how to approach feature stapling.

Feature Stapling:

Feature stapling is a technique used in SharePoint 2010 which allows you to associate a feature (say a custom master page feature) with a site collection or web site (My sites) without modifying the site definition. In this tutorial the custom master page will be deployed to the new site collection whenever it’s provisioned for the first time.

Feature: A SharePoint feature provides additional functionality to SharePoint. This feature can be used once deployed and activated on the SharePoint site. Technically a SharePoint feature is just an XML file (Feature.xml). In our tutorial we will create two features.

• The first feature (Feature1) will define the new master page we want to apply.
• The second feature (Feature2) will establish the relationship between feature 1 and our site definition.

Module: A module is SharePoint template which can be used to deploy files to your SharePoint environment. We’ll create a module to deploy our custom master page.

Summary:

Setup project in Visual Studio
Create Feature 1 (Custom master page)
Create Stapler Feature to associate Feature1 with a site Definition

Step 1: Setup Project
Add a new project to your solution called ‘’MySiteFeatureStapling” and click ok.

Next, select the security level for your site to “Deploy as a farm solution” and click finish. You can choose a sandboxed solution if you so choose. They should both work.

At this point your solution explorer should look something like this.

 Step 2: Create Feature 1 (Custom Master Page)

Right click the Features folder and click on “Add Feature”

You will then be provided with the design interface of the feature designer. You can choose to rename your feature to something more meaning if you wish. You should at this point set the scope to “Site” .

Add Module

Next, you need to right click on your project in solution explorer to add a new module. This module will be used to deploy the custom master page. Delete the sample.txt file which is provided by default and add the custom master page (in this case Test.master) you would like to deploy. Update the Elements.xml file to look like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<Module Name="Module1" List="116" Url="_catalogs/masterpage">
<File Path="Module1\Test.master" Url="Test.master" />
</Elements>
</module>

The URL attribute in the module node specifies where the file will be pushed on your SharePoint server.  It’s important to note that you can add any type of file you want to the module. Add Feature Event Receiver : The Next step is to right click feature1 and add an event receiver. A new file Feature1.EventReceiver.cs is created with a bunch of commented out code. Uncomment the methods FeatureActivated & FeatureDeactiving. Modify your code to look like this

    [Guid("f5034122-c5af-4327-ad77-b52b1a107667")]
    public class Feature1EventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver
    {
        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised after a feature has been activated.
 
        public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {
            SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;
 
            SPWeb curWeb = site.RootWeb;
 
            //create full master url
            Uri masterURI = new Uri(curWeb.Url + "/_catalogs/masterpage/Test.master");
 
            //Master page used by all forms and pages on the site that are not published
            curWeb.MasterUrl = masterURI.AbsolutePath;
 
            //master page used by all publishing pages on the site
            curWeb.CustomMasterUrl = masterURI.AbsolutePath;
            curWeb.Update();
 
        }
 
        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised before a feature is deactivated.
 
        public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {
            SPWeb curWeb = null;
            SPSite curSite = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;
 
            if (curSite != null) { curWeb = curSite.RootWeb; }
            if (curWeb != null)
            {
                //Create full master url
                Uri masterUri = new Uri(curWeb.Url + "/_catalogs/masterpage/v4.master");
 
                //master page used by all forms and pages on the site that are not publishing pages
                curWeb.MasterUrl = masterUri.AbsolutePath;
 
                //master page used by all publishing pages on the site
                curWeb.CustomMasterUrl = masterUri.AbsolutePath;
                curWeb.Update();
            }
        }

Click below for the next part of this tutorial

Feature Stapling in SharePoint 2010 Part II

SharePoint 2010 ships with many in built templates. As a developer, you might come across the need to reference these  values somewhere down the line. I’ve provided a list of the codes below. These are also available here .Please note that the Global template value can also be used as just “GLOBAL” instead of “GLOBAL#0″.

Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation TemplateName="GLOBAL" Id="944d6e47-db98-431b-a0b4-fcd08ed6bd40"></FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation>

</Elements>