Moving Nintex Workflow to a new site

As stated in an earlier blog my team was tasked with creating a SharePoint staging environment that mirrored production. Part of the SharePoint site included Nintex workflows. This did not go as smoothly as I had thought, either. Even though central admin indicated that the connection to the database had been established, whenever I tried to view my existing workflows in the SharePoint site I would see the following message: Failed to open a connection to the Nintex Workflow configuration database.
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database "" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user ''.

I stumbled upon this thread on the Nintex site which pointed me to the resolution. The appPool user account needed: 1) permissions to the Nintex database; 2) to be added to the role WSS_Content_Application_Pools

reason #312 why I hate SharePoint

I know, everyone has many reasons to hate SharePoint, and they are all valid. So, this is really just another in a long stream, but I wanted to share it any way.

We were tasked to create a staging environment which mirrored production. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. The first naive step was to create a site collection backup of production. Getting it onto the staging environment proved painful enough due to its size, but after it was finally uploaded I thought we were home free. The restore failed... repeatedly... miserably. The error message that displayed was: "The site collection could not be restored. If this problem persists, please make sure the content databases are available and have sufficient free space." I tried increasing the database size. I freed up room on the hard disk. I created a blank SharePoint site and tried to restore into that since every time I ran the restore into the existing SharePoint site the database just kept getting bigger, bigger than the production database, even though I was specifying "overwrite".

After happening upon a post where a restore was generating the same error message I noticed one responder said to can the whole site collection restore notion and just do a backup/restore of the content database.

I did it, it worked. W00T! It's not complete in that we still have to manually get the customizations back into the site, but it at least got us about 85% - 90% there.

The Dreaded "The SSP Timer Job Distribution List Import Job was not run."

Unfortunately, when I set up some test SharePoint sites on my dev machine I tied service accounts to my network userid & pwd. Our network policy requires that passwords be changed every 90 days, so every 90 days I get into a pickle because I can't remember all that I had to do so that SharePoint would continue to play nice on my machine.

1. In IIS, change the password of all App Pools that are tied to my network account and restart IIS


2. At the DOS prompt run stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <domain\userid> -password <new password> followed by iisreset /noforce


3. In Central Admin:
   
   • Go to App Management and click on "Manage Search Service" under the "Search" group and change the "Office SharePoint Search Indexing and Query" account's password
   
   
   • Click on Shared Services Administration, right-click the default shared service and select Edit Properties and update the password for the SSP Service Credentials


4. At the DOS prompt run iisreset /noforce

How to Show/Hide SharePoint QuickLaunch

The bulk of this comes from http://suguk.org/blogs/sharepointhack/archive/2008/01/29/8093.aspx

Insert the following JavaScript block immediately before the </Head> tag in your master page:


<!--
function showhide(layer_ref)
{
var state = 'block';

var tbl = document.getElementById(layer_ref);
var img = document.getElementById("img" + layer_ref);

if (tbl.style.display == 'block')
{
tbl.style.display = 'none';
img.src = "_layouts/images/BLK_RGT.GIF";
}
else
{
tbl.style.display = 'block';
img.src = "_layouts/images/BLK_LEFT.GIF";
}
}
//-->
</script>

I put the following div immediately inside the TD with ID LeftNavigationAreaCell:
<div id="divOuterQuickLaunch" style="display:block;">

I added the following immediately after the ContentPlaceHolder PlaceHolderTitleAreaSeparator:

<tr>
<td style="text-align:right;">
<a id="lnkregionalNav" style="cursor:hand" onclick="showhide('divOuterQuickLaunch');">
<img src="_layouts/images/BLK_LEFT.GIF" id="imgdivOuterQuickLaunch" alt="Show/Hide Quicklaunch"/>
</a>
</td>
</tr>


If you are looking at a list, the behavior will not be as expected as there is an image at the top of the page that prohibits the quicklaunch area from collapsing when hidden. To correct this, find the ContentPlaceHolder PlaceHolderPageImage and add Visible=”false”

That should do it.

How To: Associate a K2[blackpearl] SmartObject with a SharePoint list

This PDF describes how to associate a K2[blackpearl] SmartObject with a SharePoint list:

How To Associate a K2[blackpearl] SmartObject with a SharePoint list

How To: Associate a custom action with a specific SharePoint list

There are many web sites that discuss how to associate a custom action with a specific SharePoint list. The ones that helped me the most are:

• http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/29397132/how-to-only-apply-a-custo.aspx (includes the default SharePoint ContentTypeIds)
• http://johnholliday.net/resources/customactions.html (contains the Custom Action identifiers – what to use for GroupId and Location settings)
• http://sharepointinsight.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=33 (pretty good step-by-step instructions)
• http://www.thesug.org/blogs/moss-pit/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=db170c8d%2Daeb1%2D448b%2Dbe4b%2Da863c08b4816&ID=11

For whatever reason, I was still having problems getting it all to gel together when trying to apply custom actions to the EditControlBlock for a new list feature that I had created. To help me remember for the future, I thought I would recreate the steps here.
When creating my list template, I used the Sharepoint Solution Generator (available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7BF65B28-06E2-4E87-9BAD-086E32185E68&displaylang=en)
In the ListDefinition.xml and schema.xml files I set the Type attribute to a large number as explained in the sharepointinsight.com link above. In my case, I set the value to 22222. I then deployed my custom list to my SharePoint site.

To create the custom menu items specific to my newly created feature:

1. I started by creating a new folder in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES.

2. I then copied the Feature.xml and ListTemplates\CustomList.xml from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\CustomList into my new folder.

· In my case, I did not put the CustomList.xml file in a sub-directory but left it at the same level as the Feature.xml file.

· You should rename the CustomList.xml file to a name corresponding with the new list that was created (ex. NewListNameListFeatures.xml)

3. I modified the Feature Title, Feature Description and ElementManifest Location attributes in my Feature.xml to be specific for my list feature

· The ElementManifest Location attribute must match the filename specified in step 2

4. In the CustomList.xml file, renamed of course, I entered the following (click the image for a larger view):

For this specific scenario to work, some items of note are:

· The RegistrationId attribute must match the “Type” value used when creating the custom list.

· The Location attribute must be “EditControlBlock” for the new menu item to appear in the per-item edit control block menu

· There is no GroupId attribute if Location is EditControlBlock

· The RegistrationType attribute must be “List”

· I didn’t see anything specific about what the Id attribute should be, I simply used a naming convention of ListName-and-Action.

· The UrlAction Url attribute can be JavaScript instead of an actual url (e.g. Url="javascript:window.open('http://www.google.com');".

5. I then installed and activated my custom action using stsadm:

· stsadm -o installfeature -name <folder where custom action resides>

· stsadm -o activatefeature -name <folder where custom action resides> -url <my SP site url>

· iisreset

Voila! My list now has a new item in the edit control block menu.

How To: Remove a feature from a SharePoint site

To remove a site feature from a SharePoint site perform the following steps:

1. Make sure that *ALL* lists referencing the template/feature have been deleted from the site
2. In a command window, run the following:
   stsadm -o deactivatefeature -name "[name]" -url [url]
3. Run the following statement:
   stsadm -o uninstallfeature -name "[name]" -force
4. In Central Admin -> Operations -> Solution Management
1. Select the .wsp file of the feature to be removed and click "Retract Solution", then click "OK"
2. After the solution has been retracted, select the .wsp file again and click "Remove Solution"
5. To completely remove the project from the server, delete the folder containing the feature:
   (program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\templates\features\[feature name])