Peter Gilbert

There will be a meeting of the SharePoint User Group UK on the 27th January 2010 at 6.30pm at HP Labs in Bristol. I have been a member of this august institution for at least three if not four years, but have never attended a single meeting, my usual excuse is that as I dont have a car it's difficult to get to places like Reading and London in the evening, when these meetings are usually held.

This time, however, I have no excuse, as the meeting is to be held in our very own backyard as it were, in the HP Labs behind the staff restaurant (for us UWE people anyway). Anyway its a stone throw away from UWE (literally) so it will be easy for me to get to. No excuses then, so it looks like I'm going along.

On the agenda:
6:30pm Welcome

6:40 - 7:20 Andy Ginn: An overview of HP white papers and tools organisations can use when adopting SharePoint. Andy introduces some useful tools for sizing and configuration of SharePoint environments, and reviews research from HP labs looking at the performance of SharePoint on Windows Server 03/SQL Server 05 versus Windows Server 08/SQL Server 08 – come along and see if the results are as you would expect! Best practice guidance on the use of virtualised solutions is also reviewed.

7:20 - 7:35pm New Speaker Slot - Lee Fedder
Integrating SharePoint with insurance claims management applications via web services. Issues and lessons learned.

7:35 - 8pm Break, pizzas

8 - 9pm Mark Macrae: Utilising SQL Reporting Services in Integrated Mode for SharePoint and Empowering Information Managers with Report Builder. In this session Mark will be focussing on Reporting Services - a ‘free’ but often forgotten Business Intelligence tool which has much improved with SQL 2008. Mark will discuss the steps required to install and configure SSRS in SharePoint Integrated Mode, complete with the much improved Report Builder 2.0. He will then demonstrate how Report Builder can be used by Power Users to quickly build reports, manage and version them in SharePoint, approve and publish to an audience. Finally, Mark will examine the improvements which SharePoint 2010, SQL 2008 R2 and Report Builder 3 will offer when they are released.

To sign up go to The SharePoint User Group UK meeting thread and add your name by the 25th Jan. See you there!

 

How To Display the InfoPath Form Version on the Form - Westin's Technical Log

I was having a very long and heated discussion with somebody the other day about managing code and other assets that are used within SharePoint. They were arguing (rather persuasively) that everything should be managed using the SourceSafe that is built into Visual Studio Team Services. I was arguing the opposite tack, and that it was very difficult to manage artefacts that have been created by other developers and that don’t fit into the source code system.

The upside of all of this was of course that I lost the argument although I am still looking for a solution to this problem.

Having accepted the fact that everything has to go into such a system soon, I am taking a lot more notice of version numbers of things that I create. For instance the versioning that is built into InfoPath 2007 is very useful for tracking changes etc. But there is no obvious way of exposing that number to people at run-time. But I have found this nugget of information on Westin’s Technical Log which seems to do just that. You need to create a text box and then insert this expression:

substring-before( substring-after( /processing-instruction()[local-name(.) = "mso-infoPathSolution"], 'solutionVersion="'), '"')

And there you go. Version information about the current InfoPath Form. Very useful for when you need to find out from a user what version they are using etc. Now all I need to do is start keeping my form sources in a sensible place and I’m home free!

I have been working this last few weeks on the UWE capital bids process. This consists of SharePoint, which acts as the display surface, InfoPath, which acts as a method to capture and display data, and Skelta, which acts as the workflow controller and is the tool that we used to model the business processes. It replaces an earlier paper process that tied a large group of people up every year in an administrative round that went on sometimes for months. With the new system it looks likely that this will now be possible to get approvals within days.

Early testing has been positive, with as usual the main barriers being training and people issues rather than the technical issues that you might expect.

One of my main jobs here at UWE is the creation of forms in InfoPath to gather information from users. This data is typically used in SharePoint to initiate a workflow, or may be used elsewhere, in a database. 

When users fill out an InfoPath form, as with any web form, it is useful if you can pre-populate fields for them when the form opens. This saves time and also removes errors than can occur when people are in a hurry, or have lots of data to input. The most common item that people want to automate is filling in their own name when opening a form. Here at UWE we use Active Directory to authenticate users who use SharePoint, and as every user is pre-authenticated before they open the InfoPath form, it should be possible for me get the user’s name from their profile. And indeed it is.

InfoPath has the concept of Data Connections, both for reading data as well as writing data. Data connections can be to SharePoint lists, databases, XML files, or even web services. In this scenario I am going to show you how to query a web service on SharePoint to get the logged in user’s name, and then display it in the form.

First we need the InfoPath form. I am using InfoPath 2007 to create a simple form, this one is based on a template that has been designed by our Marketing people.

First I insert a control on the page so that the data has somewhere to go. Some people make the data connections first, I like to make the controls first then add the data later. In the picture below I have dropped  text box control where I want the data to display.

Double clicking on the text box control brings up the text box properties box. Here you can give the field a meaningful name, and also set the default value for the text. I have changed the Field Name to txtName for now. We will come back to this Default Value item in a bit after we have set up the data connector.

On the menu, under Tools\Data Connections, you can create a data connection for that form template.  Click on Add… to create a new item.

Here we are going to receive data. Click on Next. Choose Web Service from the options then Next to continue to the Web Service Details Page. Here I happen to know that SharePoint makes it’s user profile stuff available at http://yourservername/_vti_bin/userprofileservice.asmx?WSDL so that is what I put in the box. Put in the name of your own server here!

When you click Next you get a wide range of things you can query against. We are going to use GetUserProfileByName.

 

When you click Next you need to select the parameter you are going to search against. Here I am using AccountName. I expect you will do the same.

Enter a name for the data connection. It helps if you use a name that will make sense to you a year or so later when you come back to make changes!

Here I am using GetUserProfileByName. When you click finish you get a review screen that shows you what choices you have made.

To use the data connector, we go back to our textbox control on our InfoPath form and open the properties box. On the right hand side there is a function editor button. Click on the button to get the insert formula window.

Right, here is where it gets complicated. You cant just copy and paste text into here. This is a dynamic editor that takes values and builds xpath strings. Pasting or typing the text in will not work, you need to click on button then type values.

I want to insert field or group, so I click on the left button. This gives me a choice of data sources. Main is selected by default. You change it here to the source that we just made, GetUserProfileByName.

Now you have to decide what repeating section to use. The section you want is Values:

 

Now that will not give us a single value. To get the users name we have to filter the data. To do that click on the Filter Data button. Easy innit? Next click on Add… to specify the filter conditions.

 

 

Here I know that the value that I want from AD is the PreferredName, so I type in:

Clicking OK, then OK, then OK, then OK takes us back to:

Then OK again:

And again (that's a lot of OK’s) takes us back to the form. Here you can click “Preview” to run up the form and test (you have to be logged in on your domain for this to work. It doesn't work remotely…

And there you have it. The currently logged in users Preferred Name automatically appears in the text box. You can use this method to get at other values too, not just this rather easy example.

There are easier ways of getting this information, but this is a good way of learning how to get under the hood of InfoPath to get at data that you might not know is there. Later on I will show you methods that use code in the same way, but that is best left for another time!

Well here is my new UWE Blog. And here is a photo to get it going.

I will concentrate mainly on SharePoint related issues.