Archives
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FabriKam, FabriKam, FabriKam
What the hell is he talking about? Only a really cool leaning platform that we've been waiting for awhile now. The Office System Fabrikam Learning Platform is now available for pre-order. The documentation has been on MSDN for quite awhile but now we can order the real meal deal. Okay, so it's still not released but according to Mark Bower here, the DVDs are currently in production and should be shipping soon.
FabriKam is a Virtual PC image that contain sample solutions and components for SharePoint, BizTalk, and Office 2003 with a mess of goodies that you can take and munge into your own. What's inside this package? Plenty. While you can learn about the Office System as a development platform it also contains a wealth of knowledge with best practices, white papers, code samples, etc.
What can you do with this cool tool? Looking at the documentation there are some great OOTB (out-of-the-box) solutions in the SharePoint space like a Routing Service, a Multi-Library List View Web Part (aggregate multiple document libraries into one view), and a Project Site Manager solution. These are showcased solution samples that are initially horizontal specialty applications that can be re-used, repurposed or extended by developers. In addition to the SharePoint goodies there are some SQL Server Reporting solutions (Expense Report, Team Weekly Status Report, etc.) and other solutions that tie into BizTalk and other Microsoft Technologies.
Be sure to get your DVD today! You can pre-order the DVD from here (no charge for the DVD, you just pay shipping) which should be shipping in about 2 weeks.
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CDI's Education Canadian Technology Briefing Tour
My fellow SharePointBlogger and all around nice guy Eli Robillard is off starting next Tuesday on a two week, nine city tour across Canada promoting that favorite portal you love to hate. It's a free even and he's been kind enough to slosh by and drop in on us here in Cowtown (as well as those "other" cities). You get a continental breakfast and Eli will ramble on for a couple of hours on SharePoint, ASP.NET, and SQL Server 2005. Looks like it will be fun and informative and hey, it's free. Check out the CDI Technology Briefing home for dates and schedules or head on over to the online registration to reserve your seat today.
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Brain overloading... must release knowledge!
Lots of good stuff going on here. I'm winding down on a fairly intense SharePoint application development project (a Contract Management system). Still a month (or 6 you never can tell with these "agile" projects) left but things are working well. 100,000 lines of SharePoint configuration (lists, sitedefs, etc.) and 100,000 lines of C# code between 3 developers over 3 months. Not a bad effort. Out of which I have to say my SharePoint knowledge (and frustrations) have soared to new heights and I'm just full of stupid little SharePoint giblets that I'll be sharing over the next few weeks (OneNote is a great tool for capturing all these little thoughts).
On the publishing front, I'm starting to write articles for the new SharePoint Advisor magazine. Still haven't figured out what my first one will be one (feel free to toss out some ideas if you're looking for something specific that you want me to dive into). I'm also putting together a proposal for a new book on SharePoint. I want to do something in the same flavour as the O'Reilly Cookbooks (Problem/Solution/Discussion) so I'm starting that now (again if you're just itching to get something in there now's your chance). We'll see how this goes and if I can keep up the pace of my 12+ hour days along with another 4-6 hours writing. Luckily I truly only sleep 3-4 hours a night. To bed around 10 or 11 and up at 2 or 3. Guess my body is just used to it that way (I would have used the term trained by my body is anything but trained).
Visual Studio Team Systems is rolling and I'm just getting past a few quirks in the Beta 2 stuff. A few things I would have really liked to see:
- I would really like to just drag one project into the reference of another. It's such a pain sometimes to bring up the dialog to set references to projects that are in my solution. Maybe I'm just complaining because b2 keeps crashing on me with this.
- Why can't we rename classes in the Class View? We can rename them in file form (which magically will rename the class) and we can rename the class in the Designer. So why not in Class View?
These are silly and nitpicky I know and for the most part are fine the way they work now. Just some things I thought would be nice to have.
And here you thought this was going to be a well informed, thought out, and highly knowledgeable post.
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Hiding a list through FrontPage
Often you might have a list in a SharePoint site that you don't want users to get to. Something like lookup lists or whatever (adminy type stuff) that you need to have in a site but nobody should mess with. Its easy to do it through code but here's how you can do it using FrontPage 2003.
In FrontPage open up the site that contains the list. Right click on the list and select Properties and choose the Settings tab. You'll see an option Hide from browsers. Now the list won't show up in the Documents and Lists page for prying eyes to get into. Note that this will not ghost your page/site/etc. so it's a safe thing to do in FrontPage.
As with most things in SharePoint, the list is still there so someone who knows how figure out the url to it (which isn't hard) could still get to it. You can toggle this on and off anytime so to edit the list you make it visible, make your changes, and then turn it back off again. You could also link the list to a spreadsheet and save the sheet for future use. Then hide the list and make your edits through the spreadsheet.
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Expanding on Expanding and Collapsing Fields in a View
I'm pretty pleased when people get something from my blogs (it sort of validates my existing in this silly world). I'm even more pleased when they expand, extend, and otherwise enhance what started from a simple blog scribble.
One of my fellow MVPs, Renaud COMTE, took my post on creating an toggleable (if that's even a word) DataView (with a little evil JavaScript to expand and collapse large copius amounts of text in a view) and ran with it. Him and his co-worker Eric moved the work I did into the SCHEMA.XML file for a view so it would be part of the normal views in SharePoint. Very nice stuff. You can see the work they did here.
BTW, I really like the .Text skin that Bob Roudebush made which emulates the OneNote look and feel. You can download it from here. Nice stuff.
A couple of other short but somewhat important tidbits for your Friday reading.
- The Beta 2 Installation Guide for Team Foundation Server is available here. This is updated and different from the one that's included in the DVDs and MSDN download so be sure to grab it and be current.
- The FabriKam help file is available here. We've been waiting for FabriKam for a long time (and it keeps getting pushed out). I'm interested because of some of new Web Parts in it (like a really cool Multi-doclib viewer) and the solutions that are available in it that you can customize. Guess we'll have to wait a little longer.
- Finally there's the Virtual Server Deployment Manager. The Virtual Server Deployment Manager provides a streamlined way to manage and deploy Virtual Machines. Using this tool, regular users (not just administrators) will be able to create and manage their own machines, without impacting other users' machines. It's available here.
Have fun and have a great weekend!
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Best Practices and Member Initialization in C#
Today I thought I would present two slightly different approaches to class member initialization and see what people were doing out there. When you define a class you have the option to initialize member variables in the declaration or in the constructor. Here's our class creating a new ArrayList at declaration time:
public class MyClass
{
private ArrayList myList = new ArrayList();
public MyClass()
{
}
}
So you create a new instance of MyClass and the array list it created for you. The second example is to initialize it to null (a C++ type approach) and then "create" it in the constructor:public class MyClass
{
private ArrayList myList = new ArrayList();
public MyClass()
{
myList = new ArrayList();
}
}
Pretty much the same effect isn't it. There is one danger in initializing the ArrayList at declaration time though. Sometimes a developer might come along and create another constructor and re-initialize or create the ArrayList again:public class MyClass
{
private ArrayList myList = null;
public MyClass()
{
myList = new ArrayList();
}
}
No big deal in C# as it'll just add a few more operations at the IL code. No harm no foul. However if your field wasn't an ArrayList but another more complex class (that maybe incorporated other classes) it might not produce the wanted effect (especially if you read a config file or something to initialize values like in a data class to read the connection string).
Steve Eichert blogged about this a couple of years ago and asked the question as well. There didn't seem to be any hard and fast rule but there were a couple of interesting observations about it. James Curran mentioned that he prefers to initialze all data members at declaration because it parallels the initialization of local variables. That makes sense so why not? According to Sigurdur Gunnarsson, the other really interesting thing I didn't know (although I can't find it documented anywhere) is that initialization of some members (like say "string myString = string.Empty;" the compile will move the initialization into the constructor so he does his creation in the constructor to control order.
Is there a right way or wrong way here or is it a "it depends" answer? Do you have any standards you use around doing this like "all member variables will be initialized in the constructor" (at least for consistency). The Constructor Usage Guidelines in the .NET Framework General Reference doesn't seem to suggest one or the other (although the simple example they have initializes strings in the declaration).
PS anyone have a nice way of copy/paste code into .Text without it looking like it's been through the washing machine?
PPS thanks to Darrell Norton for the tip on the CopySourceAsHtml addin that I've updated the blog with. Works great!
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Validating SharePoint Web Parts
A bit of perspective, a bit of a quandry, a bit of a question today.
SharePoint web parts work fine with validation controls. If you just want to display a validation like any other you would do it (using a ValidationSummary control or the validation control itself) things work fine. Just add them to the Controls property of the Web Part and render them. No worries.
Recently I had a fairly large form that contains half a dozen fields that need to be validated. Luckily they're all simple validations (required fields only). When you have a SharePoint form (using the built-in ListForm Web Part) it displays all the controls and a red "*" where required fields are. If you try to save the form without filling out any of the fields two things happen. First you get a client side message saying something like "You must specify a non-blank value for <fieldname>" (where field name is the Display Name of the field that's required). Second, it scrolls to where the control is (and if I remember correctly sets the focus to the control for entry). So here I am trying to mimic this behavior and running into some head-scratching activities.
The way I currently started my cloning process was:
- Create a RequiredValidator control and attach it to my control I want to validate (a TextBox) in my Web Part
- Create a ValidationSummary control and set the ShowMessageBox property to true and ShowSummary property to false. This will popup a client side message box that displays whatever the error message for the control is.
- Set the ValidationSummary.CssClass property to "hidden" to prevent it from being seen in the Web Part
- Render the ValidationSummary control in the RenderWebPart method
This works fine and gives you the same result as what SharePoint does with a Form, namely popup a message box and prevent you from going forward. This works great for the first control but then when you add a second control the message box shows all messages from all invalid controls. This isn't quite what I'm looking for as the SharePoint form will only give you the latest validation message and stop there. So without getting into managing all the various messages (say through a stack object) what gives? Also there must be a way to leverage the code that the Web Part framework has to do these validations and not have to write all this stuff over again (at least that's what my pea brain says to me) however there's nothing in the ClientAPI or the standard JavaScript (blech) files I can see that would help here.
Anyone got some perspectives on doing validations in Web Parts. While it may look like madness, trying to mimic what SharePoint does, there is method to it. I would prefer to have a consistent view of error messages throughout SharePoint, both stock Web Parts and custom ones, so the users don't get all peeved that our Web Parts show it one way but when working in a list or doclib they get treated differently. Or maybe I'm just kidding myself here and it's not worth the effort.
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SQL Server 2005 CTP April 2005 available
Yeah, blog titles are getting longer and my patience for installing/uninstalling/re-installing is wearing thinner. Anyways, the April 2005 CTP edition is available for your bandwidth hogging pleasures via MSDN now. Be sure to grab the Developer Edition to get your Team Foundation server up and running (I don't think the Express edition will work but go on and prove me wrong). 840MB then another 5 hours of setting a new image again and we're golden.
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Team System Install Update
Just a quick update as I got a lot of emails about Team Foundation server and the fact that it states it needs the April CTP of SQL Server 2005 but that's not avialable on MSDN downloads yet. Yes, it's true but for my tests I had run using the February 2005 CTP. The install worked fine but some features were disabled (Reporting was there but not functional). I guess they'll have the April CTP up shortly so you can do a proper install so it might be best to wait for that. In addition to the SQL Server sillyness, you still need to install Windows SharePoint Services on the server with MSDE because it cannot talk to the SQL Server 2005 instance that Team Foundation uses. So at the end of the day your data server is going to be running SQL Server 2005 and MSDE which also means your project documents cannot exceed 2GB (due to the limit that MSDE has). Clear as mud? Yeah, time to hit the bottle again and wait for another download.
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Visual Studio Team System Beta 2 First Looks
A bit of a mouthful for a blog title but I got the whole meal deal running yesterday with Visual Studio Team System. It took 2 server setups, 1 client, a few gallons of coffee, and several dozen installs, uninstalls, re-installs and compiles to make sure everything worked correctly. And boy is it nice. I installed the Suite version which gives you all the tools that the Developer, Architect, and Test flavours have so I could give everything a run for it's money. Bear with me as it's been over 24 hours since I saw B1 and I may remember things that were there and others that were not.
First off, it's visually a little more slicker. I can't put my finger on it but overall it's looking more polished and user-friendly. The install runs more like the Express product installs and has less clutter yet more information than Beta 1. During the install you see the list of what is being installed which is nice. I think the previous one just told you from time to time what it was doing, but this shows what's going on (okay, maybe it was too many coffees for me and it's been there all along). Once inside the product, again small visual tweaks just make it look a little better. They must have some ergonomic design team measuring every pixel and trying RGB(243, 210, 120) instead of RGB(242, 210, 120) for the toolbar colours. Overall it looks nice (but then you would hope it's visually appealing considering how much money you're going to outlay for this puppy).
The install took an average amount of time, maybe faster than B1 (once you uninstalled your previous version). Now I'm running on a 3Ghz Xeon with 2GB of RAM so adjust your numbers accordingly. It was about 45 minutes for a full install from start to finish (including a reboot after the Framework was installed). If you just want Visual Studio without the other goodies then it should take about 30 minutes. I installed the full MSDN Library as well which took another 10 minutes then 5 minutes to watch it "optimize" everything else. So give yourself a couple of hours and relax. Some days I wish these guys would include a short film or maybe an episode of CSI (Las Vegas, not the crap ripoff versions) to watch while you're installing.
Warning! Uninstalling Beta 2 will uninstall all previous versions of .NET. Yup, while Beta 2 and the 2.0 Framework run side-by-side no problem, uninstalling it another matter. When you uninstall Beta 2 (as I had to do once during my setup fiasco) it wiped out, removed, and decided that I shouldn't have version 1.1 anymore either.
The IDE comes up quickly (quicker than B1 anyways) and has some small but nice changes. There's a new Community menu (at least I think it's new) that takes you (via the Microsoft Document Browser) to the feedback site to ask questions, check on a question status, or go to the new Starter Kits that are being created for 2.0. The Code Snippets are still plentiful for VB and very few for C# (which strikes me as odd but I'm sure that will change).
I only looked at the Class Designer for now (as I still can't realistically represent a SharePoint application or site in the other Designers). The biggest change here was the ability to export to an image. You don't know how much trouble I would have to go through to screen cap a model then paste it into Paint.NET just to show it to someone. There's also a Layout Diagram option that re-arranges the diagram (works for the most part) and a couple of other little things like setting auto-width on the class so all method names are visible. I wish some of these things could be set in the options but the only Designer I could see was the Domain Model Designer but it had an error on the property page. The two big things I saw with the Class Designer was showing a property as a Collection Association (which will tell you that it can't do it if it's a weakly typed collection) and showing Abstract Classes (previously abstract classes would just show as classes but with dotted borders around them). There's also a nice shortcut on the menu to show/hide member types which is handy when you're looking at the overall diagram.
I didn't notice any new refactorings avaiable however when I was doing a quick TDD test, the infamous squiggly line would appear saying my method didn't exist and if I right clicked on it there was an option to generate a method stub. It couldn't introduce a new class but would add a method/property/etc to an existing class. When calling methods/classes that didn't have a reference (but were in the solution) there was now an option called Resolve. This gave me a couple of options to either add the using statement or fully qualify the class name. Still not as slick as ReSharper but better than nothing. Hopefully we'll see the ReSharper for VS2005 soon.
The big thing I found is that the Team Foundation Server now allows you to do single or dual deployment installs. Previously each part of Foundation had to reside on a separate computer so I had to consume 3 virtual machines for this (each with 1GB of RAM allocated). Now you can do a single server deploy with the data and application tier all in one. This does require SQL Server 2005 and won't install alongside some products (for example you have to uninstall Portal Server but you still need Windows SharePoint Services for the project sites).
The Team Server stuff is just plain sweet. Once you're connected to Team Server, anytime there's a warning or error you can right click and choose to create a work item which then creates a task in SharePoint assigned to someone. Very slick to assign work this way to your team (and play a king of bughill game). Test results will be posted to the associated SharePoint site and show up in graphs depicting success to failure rates, code coverage, etc. All that neat stuff that execs and PMs want to see and that we architects and developers loathe to create.
The Test Manager is great and while some people are against generating tests after the fact, it's a nice thing to quickly get a stub created from your Domain Entity into a test project. Each run of the tests is done and results are saved. You can create your own test lists and load other test lists (like ones created for common assemblies) into your test manager to run along with it. This allows you to split up, divide and conquer any view of how you want to test your system.
Basically the test manager being built into the system can support programmer unit tests, manual tests, automated web tests, and generic tests of any kind. I see this as giving products like QuickTestPro and even TestDirector a run for their money. Combine this with the Team Server features and connectivity and you've got yourself a full suite of tools in one package. Crunch the numbers and I think you'll find that while most people gasp at the $10k/seat price tag of the Suite, add up all those other licenses you have for the various products out there (bug tracking, test management, source control) and you'll find it's about the same in the grand scheme of things.
All in all, an excellent product with lots of new possibilities with the Domain Specific Lanugage modellers and designers. I'm looking forward to poking at it over the next few months as we wait in antici....pation for the final release.
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Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2
Hmmm, wonder how I missed a blog from yesterday? Must have been one of those days.
Anywho, the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 release is available to MSDN subscribers now on the download site. It includes refreshes of SQL Server 2005 and the various Team versions of VS2005 (developer, test, architect). It also includes the Suite version which includes all three as well as the foundation (the server portion of VS2005). The Suite version is available so you can see what each flavours have capability wise and let you decide which one is right for you. Regular MSDN subscribers will only get to choose one when the product is released so here's your chance to give each one a test drive.
(image from greg hughes - dot - net)
What's odd is that I checked to see if it was available yesterday around 3PM which it wasn't. I check later and started downloading it off the MSDN site this morning around 1AM. By the time I headed off to work this morning at 8AM it hadn't finished downloading so I decided to just start a new download at work (besides, it's a 3.5gb image and I really didn't want to burn a DVD) however checking now it's not available to me (under the same account). Very odd to see how the trickle works so I must be hitting one of the machines on the web cluster that it hasn't made it's way down yet.
Update: 10AM and the files are there. Now another 15 hours of downloading and a few days of blowing up virtual images and we'll be all set.
Anyways, check it out if you have an MSDN account. I think they'll be making DVDs available for a shipping fee like they did Beta 1 but I'm sure you'll be able to pick one up at any Microsoft Event like TechEd 2005 coming up in June.
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Expanding and Collapsing Large Fields, DataView Style
Okay, got a fun one today. I was asked by someone who had a list if the description column could be collapsed and expanded. Currently if you have a list with a description field and put the description field on a view, you're left with a large verbose scrolling piece of ugliness. After a few vanilla latte's and some dead brain cells I came up with what I thought was a pretty good solution (without having to resort to writing a custom Web Part). Here's the solution.
- First create the list or decide what list you're using. It can be any list but the reason we're doing this is because we want to show a description field or something that would have a lengthy bit of text.
- Create a new Web Part page and put the list on it with the view you want to use.
- Now load up the page in FrontPage 2003
- Right click on the list and choose "Convert to XSLT..." to convert it into a DataView
- Somewhere down in the page source for the DataView there's the XSLT code to display the Description field you want this to work on. In my example I have a field called Description so you'll see something like this:
<!--Description-->
<TD Class="{$IDAEAF1I}">
<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="ddwrt:AutoNewLine(string(@Description))"/>
</TD>
- Now we want to change the output to show our collapsed or expanded text. This is done by surrounding the XSL tag with some regular HTML and a reference to some JavaScript (yes, horrors of horrors) that we'll add to the page later. So change your XSLT code to your liking but it'll be something like this:
<!--Description-->
<TD Class="{$IDAEAF1I}" width="200px" bgcolor="#ffff00">
<a title="Show/Hide" href="javascript: void(0);" onclick="toggle(this);">
<div>
<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="ddwrt:AutoNewLine(string(@Description))"/>
</div>
</a>
</TD>
In the example above, I've done a few things: Fixed the width of the TD surrounding the Description field to 200 pixels; Given it a yellow background so it stands out; and added the reference to our JavaScript function called "toggle" in the OnClick event of the new link surrounding our XSL output.
- Now we'll add a simple piece of JavaScript (yeah, you knew this was coming) to the page through a Content Editor Web Part. Add it to the page then in the Source View add this JavaScript:
<script language="javascript">
var isCollapsed = false;
var fullText = "";
function trimText(text, size)
{
var tmp = "";
tmp = text.substring(0, size);
tmp += "...";
return tmp;
}
function toggle(link)
{
if (isCollapsed == true)
{
link.innerHTML = fullText;
isCollapsed = false;
}
else
{
fullText = link.innerHTML;
link.innerHTML = trimText(fullText, 60);
isCollapsed = true;
}
}
</script>
This will get a copy of the Description field and save it (for restoring later) and trim the text down by the amount you specify (I've put in 60 here but adjust as you see fit).
That's it. Here's what the DataView Web Part looks expanded:
And here it is collapsed after clicking on the Description:
Simple and easy. Hope that helps.
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SharePoint Podcasting in English
Michael Greth over in Germany has put together a neat podcast on SharePoint, the first one in English. Mike has been doing SharePoint podcasting for awhile now (he's on his 10th one) but this is the first one he's put together in English (with his uber-cool German accent). You can check out Mikes post here or download the MP3 file directly here.
If you don't know what podcasting is, think of it as audio blogging (overly simplified but its the concept). There are also video podcasts but for the most part they're usually audio (MP3, etc.). The term sort of grew out of Apple's iPod but has gone on way beyond that. It's a pretty slick concept and very interesting. In the IT world (and say SharePoint) other than news I'm still trying to figure out how it could be interesting. I used to listen to an internet broadcast audio show (via BluesNews) on Quake and the various FPS happenings out there (can't remember the name of the show) and it was always fun. Having a weekly SharePoint show is a concept too but then there's podcasting so you could just put MP3s up for people to listen to. I'm still just trying to figure out how I could make SharePoint exciting through audio because without a whiteboard and some code samples, I'm a pretty boring guy. There's a pretty cool article on making your own podcasts (as well as how to get them) here so check it out (and don't blame me if you become addicted).
Patrick Tisseghem jumps in for a short bit to talk about the SharePoint Advisor Conference in June as well. I was planning on going to the conference but for some reason nobody got back to me quick enough to get a presentation ready (or I didn't get it submitted in time or some forces of nature prevented me to connect to the city that never sleeps) so again I won't make it (that's 3 conferences I've missed so far this year but for sure I'll be at PDC and the MVP Summit).
Anyways, I'm quite supportive of this and will probably try doing a little of it myself (doing a text blog as well as a podcast or something). Guess my short radio DJ job so many years ago might still pay off. Watch for something silly in this space (more silly than my normal rants) coming soon to a MP3 player near you.
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SBS Usergroups Workshop - Hosted by SBS MVPs
Forgive me bloggers, for I have sinned. It's been a week since my last blog. Okay, so no SharePoint or DDD babble today but wanted to tell you about an upcoming event on SBS (Small Business Server) here in Cowtown.
From Susan Bradleys blog:
The Canadian SBS MVPs invite resellers and consultants who want to understand solutions for small business customers to join together for an evening of presentations and discussion. The local chapters of SBS and Windows professional groups across Canada are joining together with sponsorship by Microsoft to bring a group of Microsoft Small Business Server “Most Valuable Professionals” to meet with you. Each of the SBS MVPs appearing on this tour is an experienced resellers and a community leader. You can expect the same no-nonsense expertise on SBS and related technology applications you read in the newsgroups to be brought to this discussion.
You will have a unique opportunity to speak informally or ask technical questions from some well respected MVPs from across North America, including our special guest, Jeff Middleton SBS MVP (US). For this event series (except Toronto), Jeff will be explaining how his Swing Migration method for SBS and Windows server upgrades ends working on weekends or extensive business shutdown.
Here are the event details:
Thursday, April 21, 2005 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM (Mountain Time)
Welcome Time: 5:45 PM
Language: EnglishLocation: Altius Centr - 2nd Floor Boardroom
500 4th Ave SW
2nd Floor
Calgary, AlbertaHere's the link to the MSDN Event page where you can register. Hope to see you there.
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Repository Save vs Update
One thing that has bugged me to no end (yes, I'm easily irked) is the concept of Save vs. Update. People seem to always follow the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) mentality even when dealing with objects. Take a class following the Repository pattern:
public class Repository
{
public static void Update(DomainObject obj)
{
// Find the information to update
// Update the values
}
public static void Save(DomainObject obj)
{
// Add a new item to the repository
// Update the values
}
}
public class Repository
{
public static void Update(DomainObject obj)
{
// Determine if this is new or not
// If new, add a new item otherwise
// find the existing item and update the values
}
private static void Add(DomainObject obj)
{
// Add a new item to the repository
}
}
So now I'm only exposing the Update method to any callers to the Repository and let the Repository make the decision whether or not this is a new item or not. The Add is hidden and maybe I have a private method to do a find based on an identity in the DomainObject. In some cases (like if my Repository is a facade to a DBMS) then I really just need a new id back from the add then I could do a Save using that information which would transmogrify my Repository into something like this:
public class Repository
{
public static void Update(DomainObject obj)
{
// Determine if this is new or not
if(!FindById(DomainObject.Id))
{
DomainObject.Id = Add();
}
// Now update the item using a Mapper
Mapper.Save(DomainObject);
}
private static long Add()
{
// Add a new item to the repository
// could be in-memory or a write to a DBMS
return SomeMethodToAddRecordInDBMS();
}
private static bool FindById(long id)
{
// Do some kind of find of an item with the same identity
return SomeMethodToFindRecordInDBMS(id);
}
}
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Document Mover Utility
Stumbled across a new utility that popped up on my SharePoint radar (Sharedar?). Here's the blurb from the author:
Documents Mover is a tool that moves the files between sharepoint document libraries and keeping the version history and the directory structure of the files.
Simple enough. I gave it a whirl and it works pretty well. Good error handling and such. It does suffer from a few problems that the author might want to consider on enhancing (and these are just my nitpicks):
- The tool only allows you to move files from one document library to another in the same site/area. Personally I would want something that moved from one site to another.
- The tool is another one that has to be run on the server. When are we going to be able to write tools that work anywhere? (yes, you could use my SharePoint Wrappers but it has limited functionality)
Okay, so the second point is more of my rant about how to build tools for SharePoint rather than what the author did. Anyways, nice handy tool if you need to move documents around in a site and retain the history. Check out the tool and download here.
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MVP for another year!
My MVP anniversary is coming up (April 12) and like a bad penny, yes, I'm back in the clan (for at least another year).
Normally Microsoft sends out a congratulations message then a small package with the MVP details, NDAs, etc. Again like last year, my MVP package came before the email telling me that I would be getting the package. Guess the MVP gals are a little dyslexic. No matter. I'm quite happy to be be recognized again and will continue to be as witty and annoying as I was last year.
Here's to another year of SharePoint evangelizing, postings, blogging, rants, raves, tools, and all around good times (although my frustration levels continue to rise so I might just scratch out the SharePoint Portal Server text on my award and change it to WebSphere).
