SharePoint Document Puller: Extract any Word document from your SharePoint portal and save it on your hard disk!

This is a small tool developed to extract documents from your SharePoint portal. Documents extracted will be saved to your hard disk. This utility will be of great help to the administrators who use SharePoint as document management system. I have worked with such systems. I have deployed enterprise level document management systems for large organizations and I know they have got hundreds of thousands of documents to store in SharePoint libraries. Searching for specific documents in such a large document management system is a headache, so that is where this tool will come in handy. Users can search for Word documents in SharePoint. Tool will return all word documents from all sites, subsites, libraries, etc. With a single click of a button, user can save the selected document to the hard disk. It's that simple.

I could have made this tool a complicated one with lots of other features but for the sake of simplicity, I have kept it small and simple. This version has two main features:

1. With a single click, you can find all Word documents in your SharePoint deployment.
2. You can save selected document to your hard disk.

Some features that I wanted to implement and might include in the next version:

1. Currently, application retrieves database settings from a text file and hence, it is important for users to modify this text file before being able to use the application. I wanted to include a couple of fields on the form itself so that users would not have to modify the text file. Furthermore, new users may find it difficult to locate the SharePoint database and add it's name to the connection string in the text file.

2. This application searches only Word files in SharePoint whereas it should have the capability to find all other types especially PDF, XLS, PPT, etc. This is not much work and only a couple of lines need to be included in the code. I promise I will do it in next release.

3. Application saves the Word file in the folder where the executable resides. Application should have allowed the user to select a location on the hard disk. This will be included in next release.

Here is what you need to do to run the executable:

1. Edit the db.txt file which is located in the same folder where the EXE resides. This file contains the db connection string. Modify the connection string in this file.

Data Source=sqlserver;Initial Catalog=myPortal1_SITE;User Id=sa;Password=abcd;

"Data source" is your sql server name. "Initial Catalog" contains the name of your portal server site database, for example, if your portal name is "myPortal" then most probably, your database name will be "myPortal1_SITE". Remember, there are three main databases associated with your portal:

a. myPortal1_PROF
b. myPortal1_SERV
c. myPortal1_SITE

We are concerned about the third one only, myPortal1_SITE. You also need to provide User Id and Password (if any) for your database. Modify the connection string and save the db.txt file.

The zip file attached contains only two files: SPDocPuller.exe and db.txt. I could have created an installer but that would have taken a lot of space unnecessarily. I assume you will be running this tool on the SharePoint box. The executable references following files, therefore these should be available on your machine:

1. Microsoft.Office.Core
2. Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal
3. Microsoft.VisualBasic
4. Scripting

Clicking the "Pull Document" button will save the file in the same folder from where you will run the executable file.

I will be looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

Thanks,

-SSA

Manipulating SharePoint list's metadata from inside InfoPath

Yes, this is possible. You can manipulate SharePoint's list metadata from inside InfoPath. You must have InfoPath toolkit installed. See following post for reference:

/ssa/archive/2006/06/02/8029.aspx

You can get/set values in SharePoint list. Recently, I was working on a workflow solution that involved both SharePoint and InfoPath. Till now, all the workflow solutions that I developed used SharePoint as the main tool and workflow was built into SharePoint but this time, the requirement was a bit different. We wanted to build the workflow solution directly in InfoPath form and part of this requirement was to set a property's value in document library directly from InfoPath form. "Approval Status" field in form library can contain one of the following values:

1. Approved
2. Rejected
3. Pending

Depending on your form's requirements, you can set the value of "Approval Status" field directly from InfoPath. Here is the code:

SPWeb mySite = new SPSite("http://yourportal/sites/HR/HRForms/Forms/mod-view.aspx").OpenWeb();
SPFolder myFolder = mySite.GetFolder("HRForms");
SPFileCollection myFiles = myFolder.Files;
try
{
foreach (SPFile fyle in myFiles)
{
fyle.Item.ModerationInformation.Status = Microsoft.SharePoint.SPModerationStatusType.Pending;
fyle.Item.Update();
}
}


Code Explanation:

Open your site using OpenWeb() method. In the code above, first line opens a site called "HR". "HR" site has a folder named "HRForms" and this folder contains all forms. In the for-each loop, we are setting each file's status to "Pending". It is important to call the Update() method in order to apply the changes.

Add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint (Microsoft.SharePoint.dll) and add following namespaces in the code:

using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using System.Collections;

-SSA

Gates to quit Microsoft

http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/15/gates-retiring-microsoft-cx_gl_0615autofacescan10.html

Any Comments??

Checking User Permissions in SharePoint

Following is the code to check the rights of the users. Following code will show only those sites for which user has read privileges.

    Function CheckRights(ByVal sitePath As String, Byval strUser as string) As Boolean

    //sitePath contains the site that you retrieved in the code shown above

    // strUser contains the user for whom you want to check the rights and retrieve sites

        Try
            Dim blnStatus As Boolean = False
            If Not sitePath Is Nothing Or Not sitePath = "" Then

                Dim rtn As String() = parseURL(sitePath)

                    Dim siteCollection As SPSite
                    siteCollection = New SPSite(sitePath)
                    Dim site As SPWeb = siteCollection.OpenWeb(rtn(0))

                    Dim allUsers As SPUserCollection = site.Users
                    Dim user As SPUser

                    For Each user In allUsers
                        If user.LoginName.ToUpper = strUser Then

                            Dim allGroups As SPRoleCollection = user.Roles
                            Dim group As SPRole

                            For Each group In allGroups

                                Dim right As Integer
                                right = group.PermissionMask And SPRights.ViewListItems

                                If right = SPRights.ViewListItems Then

                                    blnStatus = True
                                    Return blnStatus
                                    Exit Function

                                End If
                            Next

                        End If
                    Next

                Return blnStatus

            End If

        Catch ex As Exception
            //Exception handling code here!
        End Try

    End Function

The function shown above (CheckRights) uses another function called as parseURL(). Following is the code for the parseURL() function:

Public Function parseURL(ByVal _fullPath As String) As String()

_fullPath = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode(_fullPath)

Dim site As SPSite = New SPSite(_fullPath)

Dim web As SPWeb = site.RootWeb

Dim webPath As String = _fullPath.Replace(web.Url & "/", "")

Dim rtnObject As String() = {"", "", ""}

Dim w As SPWeb

Dim folderPath As String = ""

Dim docLibPath As String = ""

Dim i, j As Integer

While CType(w, Object) Is Nothing

Try

w = site.OpenWeb(webPath)

Dim s As String = w.ID.ToString

'//above will raise the exception too

Catch ex As Exception

w = Nothing

i = webPath.LastIndexOf("/")

If i = -1 Then

Exit While '//means the end of subsite lookup

End If

j = webPath.Length

webPath = webPath.Remove(i, j - i)

End Try

End While

'//if there was some sub-site object then

If Not CType(w, Object) Is Nothing Then

folderPath = _fullPath.Substring(_fullPath.IndexOf(webPath) + webPath.Length + 1)

If folderPath.IndexOf("/") > 0 Then

docLibPath = folderPath.Substring(0, folderPath.IndexOf("/"))

folderPath = folderPath.Remove(0, folderPath.IndexOf("/") + 1)

End If

If docLibPath = webPath Then webPath = "" '_fullPath

rtnObject(0) = webPath

rtnObject(1) = docLibPath

rtnObject(2) = folderPath

Else '//there was no sub-site obect was found

folderPath = _fullPath.Substring(_fullPath.IndexOf(webPath))

If folderPath.IndexOf("/") > 0 Then

docLibPath = folderPath.Substring(0, folderPath.IndexOf("/"))

folderPath = folderPath.Remove(0, folderPath.IndexOf("/") + 1)

End If

If docLibPath = webPath Then webPath = "" '_fullPath

rtnObject(0) = webPath

rtnObject(1) = docLibPath

rtnObject(2) = folderPath

End If

Return rtnObject

End Function

Note: I know this will seem a bit complicated to you if you are a beginner but believe me it is not that complicated. It's pretty straight forward.

1. You retrieve sites from the portal.

2. You plug in CheckRights() function that checks whether the site has a user you passed in as a parameter and whether that user has reader rights.

3. parseURL() function is used by the CheckRights() function.

Just copy and paste the above functions, you may need to do minor tweaking and it should work fine.

-SSA

"A site template has been applied to this site"

This is a very frequent error that users get especially when restoring backed up sites.  Here is the exact error message:

Server error: A site template has already been applied to this site. Once a template has been applied, the site must be deleted and recreated in order to apply a different template.

I just found a link on Microsoft site that confirms that this is a problem in the Microsoft products. Here is the link:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;830978&spid=2514&sid=36

I would suggest users to use the second technique, that is, saving your site using "Save as Template" option. Note that you only get this error when you are trying to migrate your site from one location to another, especially if that *another* location is SPS 2003. If you are restoring the site to it's original location, then you don't get this error.

Here is a work around for this problem:

Create a new site on the target location (where you want to restore the site) and when "Select Template" page loads, do not apply a template and leave the page open. Now return to your back up site and restore it. You won't get an error this way because no template was applied to the site. 

-SSA

Creating your own document library with your own set of fields

Creating your own document library with your own set of fields

You manage a large document management system in your organization. Your organization has many departments. You create a site for each department and each site has a document library. You add some custom fields in your library but you don't want the dialog box to pop-up asking users to enter values for the custom fields whenever they insert a new document. You may have experienced this in your company. When you add custom fields in your document or form library, a dialog box pops up every time user tries to add a new document. Suppose, the number of custom fields exceeds 10. You don't want your users to be presented with a dialog box with more than 10 fields to be filled up every time they add a file. You need to add these fields in all the document libraries in your SharePoint Portal. What do you do? Go to each library, and add these fields? Not a good solution!! Wouldn't it be nice if all these fields get added to your document library template? This way when you will add a new document library to a site, all the custom fields will already be part of the document library and interestingly, you won't get that dialog box popping up each time a document is added to the library.

Let's create a document library template of our own with the following new fields:

1. Level
2. Workflow
3. Approver

Here are the steps to create a template of our own:

1. Go to following location: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATE1033STSLISTS

2. Copy "DOCLIB" folder and paste it in the same folder. Rename new folder to "MYDOCLIB"

3. Go to: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATE1033STSXML. This location contains ONET.XML file.

4. After taking back up of the original file, open ONET.XML and locate the following line:

<ListTemplate Name="doclib" DisplayName="Document Library" Type="101" BaseType="1" OnQuickLaunch="TRUE" SecurityBits="11" Description="Create a document library when you have a collection of documents or other files that you want to share. Document libraries support features such as sub-folders, file versioning, and check-in/check-out." Image="/_layouts/images/itdl.gif" DocumentTemplate="101"></ListTemplate>

Copy and paste the following line underneath the above line:

<ListTemplate Name="mydoclib" DisplayName="My Document Library" Type="899" BaseType="1" OnQuickLaunch="TRUE" SecurityBits="11" Description="This is a customized Document Library. Create a document library when you have a collection of documents or other files that you want to share. Document libraries support features such as sub-folders, file versioning, and check-in/check-out." Image="/_layouts/images/itdl.gif" DocumentTemplate="101"></ListTemplate>

5. Open Schema.xml from the following path:

C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATE1033STSLISTSMYDOCLIB

6. Take backup of the original file before making changes. Locate following code in the schema.xml:

<List xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" Name="Documents" Title="Shared Documents" Direction="0" Url="Shared Documents" BaseType="1" >
<MetaData>
<Fields>
...

Inside <Fields> tag, you can include your own fields. Add following lines inside <Fields> and </Fields> tags:

<Field Type="Text" Name="Level" ShowInNewForm="FALSE" ShowInFileDlg="FALSE" DisplayName="Level"></Field>
<Field Type="Text" Name="WorkFlow" ShowInNewForm="FALSE" ShowInFileDlg="FALSE" DisplayName="WorkFlow"></Field>
<Field Type="Text" Name="Approver" ShowInNewForm="FALSE" ShowInFileDlg="FALSE" DisplayName="Approver"></Field>

Save schema.xml!

7. Restart IIS.

Now, go to "CREATE" page, you will see two document library templates. Select your newly added template and create a document library. This library will have additional fields by default. You can add as many fields as you like. 

-SSA

 

Antivirus products for SharePoint

Traditional Anit-Virus programs do not detect viruses in SharePoint document libraries and hence, it is important to use products specific to SharePoint. There are viruses that use vulnerability in SharePoint to allow cross site scripting and spoofing attacks, for example, Bloodhound.Exploit.27 virus.

Here are some products that you can use:

Sybari Antigen for SharePoint
http://www.sybari.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=3347

Symantec Antivirus for SharePoint
http://www.symantec.com/Products/enterprise?c=prodinfo&refId=829

McAfee PortalShield for SharePoint
http://www.mcafee.com/uk/products/mcafee/antivirus/coll_env_protection/portalshield.htm

BitDefender for SharePoint
http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-49-en--BitDefender-for-MS-SharePoint-2003.html

Microsoft Security Article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/alerts/info/collaborationsecurity.mspx

Microsoft Security Bulletin:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS05-006.mspx

I have tested Sybari and Symantec products, both work fine with SharePoint.

-SSA