Isolator for SharePoint

hoanguyen — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:42:00 GMT

It's great that now you can unit test SharePoint without having a SharePoint server. Here is full quote from typemock

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here. The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

Parsing OneNote XML with LINQ to XML

hoanguyen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:21:31 GMT

Recently I was involved in a small project (http://www.codeplex.com/onenote2pdf) to write a command-line utility to export entire OneNote's notebook/section/or section group to a PDF file with some customization in PDF output such as Table of Contents, Bookmark, etc.

OneNote 2007 supports some level of interacting with external application by means of API, and there is an API that export entire structure of a notebook including its sections, sectiongroups, and pages at all level into XML string.

As you can see, the XML exported by OneNote contains notebook hierarchy: Notebook node can contain many Section and SectionGroup nodes, SectionGroup node can contain many Section and nested SectionGroup nodes, and Section node contains only Page nodes.

My task was build the hierarchy of notebook, sectiongroups, sections, and pages from exported XML. With the help of LINQ, parsing this XML string is rather simple task. However, due to the recursive nature of data, I have to implement some recursive functions to build the entire hierarchy.

First, get the desired notebook information such as name, ID from input XML

// Define XML namespace
XNamespace oneNS = 
  "http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/onenote/2007/onenote"; 
XDocument outputXML = XDocument.Parse(OneNoteNoteBookXML);
notebook = 
    (from nb in outputXML.Descendants(oneNS + "Notebook")
     select new Data.ONNotebook
     {
         Name = nb.Attribute("name").Value,
         ID = nb.Attribute("ID").Value,
         Sections = SelectSections(nb),
     }).First();

In the above code snippet, function SelectSections was called to build Section/SectionGroup hierarchy for the desired notebook.

private List<Data.ONSection> SelectSections(XElement xml)
{
    List<Data.ONSection> sections =
        (from section in xml.Elements()
         where 
             (section.Name == oneNS + "SectionGroup") ||
             (section.Name == oneNS + "Section")
         // orderby section.Value
         select new Data.ONSection
         {
             Name = section.Attribute("name").Value,
             ID = section.Attribute("ID").Value,
             SubSections = SelectSections(section),
             Pages = SelectPages(section),
         }).ToList();
    return sections;
}

// Get page information out of XML

private List<Data.ONPage> SelectPages(XElement xml)
{
    List<Data.ONPage> pages =
        (from page in xml.Elements(oneNS + "Page")
         // orderby section.Value
         select new Data.ONPage
         {
             Name = page.Attribute("name").Value,
             ID = page.Attribute("ID").Value,
         }).ToList();
    return pages;
}

So with the help of LINQ to XML, we can parse a very complex XML file with ease.

Happy Coding!

Hello World

hoanguyen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:48:09 GMT

hi all, just to let the world knows that this is my official blog on .NET technologies. I will post my experiments on the way to learn .NET tech. here to share with the community. That's all for now.

Nguyen Huu Hoa's Blog

Isolator for SharePoint

Parsing OneNote XML with LINQ to XML

Hello World