At some point when we were adding a new site under "Sites" by selecting the "create site in the left column, we were not able to select the folder "sites" anymore. Only "personal" was visible. After some investigation i found the cause.

SharePoint works with so called "managed paths". These paths define which paths are excluded (if you need to access a physical path on disk) and which paths are included (paths managed by Windows SharePoint Services).

You can reach this by going into SharePoint Central Administration, Windows SharePoint Services. Select "Extend or upgrade virtual server" and select the website from "complete list". Under "Virtual Server Management" there is an option called "Define managed paths".

Check if the "sites" and "personal" both are defined under "included paths". Now goto "site settings" of your website. select the option "Manage personal sites" under "User Profile, Audience, and Personal Sites".

Check if "personal" is selected at "Personal Site Location". In my case "sites" was selected which caused "sites" missing. The managed path selected here will NOT appear at the create site page. Now goto the website again and select the the page "Sites". Choose "Create site" under "Actions" and there it is again. Your "sites" folder appears again.

I'm already working some time with MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and have installed the beta 1 and beta 2 versions of the product. Last week i had to reinstall MOSS for some reason and got into problems.

Every time when you try to run the configuration wizard i got the following error:

Failed to create the configuration database. Reason: The language is not supported on the server.

After googling and thanks to a few guys there i found the solution. You have to make some registry changes before running the configuration wizard again. If you have choosen the "advanced" installation containing farms you have to remove two databases from SQL Server 2005.

The fix is:

• Start regedit.exe at your Windows 2003 Server
• lookup the the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\ServerLanguage] en put there a string value "1033"=""

You could also put the following into a fix.reg file using notepad:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\ServerLanguage]
"1033"=""

Thanks to Kevin Tunis :)

We are currently working on a project were we are using Community Server and CMS. Users are able to post a message which is stored in Community Server and connected to an article inside CMS. It is also possible to use an RSS feed.

One of the tags inside the RSS feed contained html tags. This is content from a html editor control during the posting. The problem we got was that the html tags were displayed as normal text in stead of incorparated into the generated html.

The following modification (see bold) was needed to incorporate the html inside the field "description" in the html page using XSL.

<xsl:stylesheet>
   <xsl:output method="html"  />
   <xsl:template match="/">
      <xsl:for-each select="rss/channel/item">
         <div class="reactie-oneven">
         <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
         <tr>
            <td></td>
            <td width="100%">
               <div class="content-brood">
               <strong>Door <span class="content-reacties-auteur">
               <xsl:value-of select="dc:creator" /></span> op 
               <span class="content-reacties-datum">
               <xsl:value-of select="pubDate" /></span></strong><br></br>
               <xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
               </div>
            </td>
         </tr>
         </table>
         </div>
      </xsl:for-each>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The actual xml looks like:

<rss>
   <channel>
      <item>
         <title>Reactie op Yes</title>
         <link>http://test.yes.nl/yescafe/forums/22/ShowForum.aspx</link>
         <description>&lt;P&gt;...&lt;/P&gt;</description>
      </item>
   </channel>
</rss>

More information can be found in a knowledge base article of microsoft

One of our customers uses document libraries in SPS2001 containing a minus sign in their path. They are going to migrate their environment to SPS2003 and have setup a test environment.

When they created a document library containg a minus sign in its name, its url was created without the minus sign. It was replaced with nothing. For example: The name "new-documents" will generate a document library with the name "new-documents" and the url "http://somedomain/newdocuments" in stead of "http://somedomain/new-documents".

It seems that in SPS2003 the use of a minus sign is not possible anymore. Even if you edit the document library it will not accept the use of a minus sign in the url.

In this case we found a solution. After creating the document library we made some changes in the database. I know that Microsoft does not support changing the database but in this case we had no other solution.

If you go to the table "Docs" and look at the field "DirName" you will find some rows containing the paths to the files: Forms, allitems.aspx, dispform.aspx, editform.aspx, template.aspx, upload.aspx and webfldr.aspx. Change the names by entering the minus sign at the correct solution.

Finally there is in the column "LeafName" one recor containing the name "newdocuments" and the column "DirName" is empty. Also this one has to be changed to "new-documents".

No try it by entering the correct (with minus sign) url in your webbrowser. It works! :)

I always forget the exact order in which events fire. So i found the following when i googled and wanna share it with you all :)

Page.Init + Control.Init for every control on the Web Form
The first stage in the page life cycle is initialization. After the page's control tree is populated with all the statically declared controls in the .aspx source the Init event is fired. First, the Init event for the Page object occurs, then Init event occurs for each control on the Page. Viewstate information is not available at this stage.

Page.LoadViewState
After initialization, ASP.NET loads the view state for the page. ViewState contains the state of the controls the last time the page was processed on the server.

Page.ProcessPostData
Post Data gets read from the request and control values are applied to control initalized in stage 1.

Page.Load + Control.Load for each control on the Page
If this is the first time the page is being processed (Page.IsPostback property), initial data binding is performed here.

"Change" events are fired for controls
(TextChanged, SelectedIndexChanged, and similar) The current value (from Post Data) is compared to the original value located in the ViewState. If there is a difference "Changed" events are raised.

Server-side events are fired for any validation controls
Button.Click + Button.Command
The Click and Command events are fired for the button that caused the postback

Page.PreRender + Control.PreRender

Page.SaveViewState
New values for all the controls are saved to the view state for another round-trip to the server.

Page.Render

Today i'm giving a presentation for a group of students about a project using SharePoint. In my case its a project built in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

Last week i was at the customers location and did a backup of the WSS site. Today i tried to set it up in my Virtual PC environment, and with success! :)

There are still some issues which are not handled by the backup / restore functionality of stsadm command.

Just for your information some of these issues:

• It is only possible to restore the WSS site when the same or higher service pack is installed
• If you're using Custom WebParts. You have to copy them into your bin folder or install them into the GAC.
• Also do not forget to place the <SafeControl> entry in the web.config file
• If you're using SessionState do not forget to turn it on in the web.config file
• I always advise to create per site your own layouts and images folder. Change the paths of the virtual directories in IIS

I used the following command line to restore the database:

stsadm -o -restore -url http://somsite -filename d:\pub\somesite.bkp -overwrite

Its always a fact that Microsoft does not support modifications to database schemas or database structures of SharePoint. These changes can be overwritten by service packs, upgrades or new versions of the product.

But.... still.... i came accross an article by Andy May which contained a link to the MSDN of microsoft where Microsoft describes each table of the SharePoint database. It still contains a Microsoft standard warning at the top. :)

So, whats the reason for this? Why listing the database tables?

The link to MSDN can be found at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/tsdbTables_SV01051532.asp

The article of Andy May can be found at:

I always like these kind of postings. Proofing that some things are possible :) In his example he adds a WebPart Page to a Document Library by altering some code in the well-known ONET.XML. Do not be afraid of editing this file. Its quite easy to understand whats going on.

Check your documentation "Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 Software Development Kit" (file spptsdk.chm) and look for ONET.XML. You will find an article describing each bit of this file.

The article describing pre-populating a document library can be found at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjwalker/archive/2005/10/26/484879.aspx

Thanks to Christopher Walker!

Todd wrote a nice article about showing styles when moving your cursor around. A lot of people asked him how to alter elements of WSS WebPart Pages. He gives a good walk-through and some code. Thanks Todd :)

http://mindsharpblogs.com/todd/archive/2005/10/25/798.aspx