You probably wondered why my blog has been quiet the last two weeks. Well, today my colleague Gijs in ‘t Veld and I published our white paper on BizTalk Server and SharePoint integration, describing best practices for providing a “face” to BizTalk Server. It describes three examples: Exception Handling...

It seemed simple enough. I built a custom New Item form. Naturally, it needed to redirect to another page after completion. Normally for a "return page" function, a "Source" parameter in the querystring will suffice, but that didn't seem to work here. I found the Form Action Button (under Insert->SharePoint...

Stephen from SharePoint Designer Team had lately published a great article about options available to users for locking down SharePoint Designer 2007 (SPD). I review & re-visit that list to evaluate requirements missing, and what can be done by a developer to fill the gap of “selective lockdown”...

Collaboration features on SharePoint 2007 are undisputedly excellent, but there is occasional quirk which impede serious usability. One of them is absence of left navigation, or “quick launch”, on custom created web-part pages in any SharePoint site. Though you can choose from various web-part page layout...

Having created this little video late last year, I finally figured it could use a link here. This is an often-neglected feature of SPD, which is a shame because it's pretty powerful. The above-linked clip walks through a simple calling of the Lists web service. Update: New link! Video moved to avoid...

Yes, you can do this with an Event Receiver. You might be able to do it with a VS workflow, or possibly one of those fancy third-party tools... maybe not. But if you're a SharePoint admin with nothing but SharePoint Designer and you need to determine if a field changed, here's how. 1) Create a new field...

Recently, a colleague came to me with a simple task and an inscrutable error. He just wanted to populate a text field with a querystring value. If you've ever done this in SPD, you know it's fairly simple: create a parameter, map it to a querystring value, and then use the resulting parameter name in...

Did you know that when you're working on custom Edit form and add an extra field via the Columns command, SharePoint Designer will sometimes add the field in Insert mode instead of Update mode? Yes, it will. Sometimes. The binding portion of the field should look like this: __designer:bind="{ddwrt:DataBind...

This came up today on the [sharepointdiscussions] list. A user needed to display a read-only field in a phone number format; it's pretty simple, but it may be just what you need. Assuming your list item contains a field called "Phone Number" (with a space), the following XPath will give you a number...

This post is long overdue, but since the question keeps popping up on various SharePoint discussion lists, I figured I'd document the answer here (next time I can just post a link instead of typing the whole thing out again). In a SPD workflow, you cannot trigger a SharePoint workflow when a column changes;...