Few Learning with Views & Alerts in SharePoint

Conditional Alerts: I was working on a project where we want to use SharePoint Alerts to notify the users when any new items are added in the list but we wanted that these alerts should be sent based on few conditions. By default when we set alerts SharePoint allows to subscribe to all the changes and we can not mention any conditions on which alerts can be sent. But this can be achieved using the Filtered Views. Filtered views are nothing but normal views but they have been created with at least one Filter condition. Once a view is created SharePoint allows to subscribe the alerts based on this view.

Once a Filtered View is created users see another option by the name "Someone changes an item that appears in the following view" where they can select the View on which they should be alerted. So now SharePoint will only send the alerts when any data changes based on the filter conditions applied in the view.

Data Order in Alert Mails: We have customized the list form using InfoPath and it was required to change the order of the data in the alert mails. By default the alerts which are sent, dependent on the column creation. So the column which are created earlier are shown on top in the alert mail. But this can be changed by using the Column Order settings:

So if change the ordering of the column the alert mails gets updated and the data will start appearing in the order specified through this.

Subject Line of Alerts: The Alerts which SharePoint sent have Title in the subject line. If we keep the title blank SharePoint uses ID to be appended in the subject line for the alerts.

Un-subscribing or Deleting existing Alerts: If a user has subscribed alerts from specific lists they can cancel those alerts. The link for doing so is not been placed in a very obvious place. You can do so
1. Either by going to any list and go to Actions and under that Alert Me. You will see a link with the title
"View my existing alerts on this site":

This link is also helpful if a user want to see all the list for which the user has subscribed the alerts. From the next page user can delete any subscribed alerts.

2. Same can be done from the User Name then My Settings. Here a link will be shown with the name 'My Alerts'. 

Understanding Extending A Web Application in SharePoint

SharePoint allows to expose the same content to two different set of users with different URL's and with different authentication. This is called Extending a Web Application. I will try to explain this concept in this post.

Lets say a company has a Web Site on SharePoint for Internal users. The users access the site using a URL http://demo-intranet. The internal users are using Windows Authentication to access the site. Now we need to expose the same content over extranet using another URL as http://extranet-demo.com. The external users will be accessing the application using Form Based Authentication. This situation can be dealt using this concept.

As we know each Web Application has a corresponding IIS Web Site. When we extend a Web Application another Web Application gets created which in turn also creates a new IIS Web Site. This extended Web Application uses the same Content DB used by the original Web Application . This new web site has its own Web.Config file but SharePoint does not copy the content of the original Web.config into this new Web.Config. So any modification which are done in the file needs to be manually done in this new Web.Config File.

The extended Web Application uses the same authentication type of the original Web Application. So if the original Web Application is configured using Classic mode then the extended Web Application will be configured using Classic mode or if it Claims based then the extended one will also use Claims based authentication.

Updating Content Editor Web Parts using Powershell

I was working on a project where we need to update quite a few Content Editor web parts in a SharePoint 2010 applications. This task was taking longer to do manually but can be done quickly by using a Powershell script. Here is the Powershell which you can use to load data in Content Editor Web Parts:

$CEWebPart = new-object  $typeName
$CEWebPartType = $CEWebPart.GetType().ToString()

if($CEWebPartType -eq “Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart”)
{
        if($WebPartContent)
# This content would be updated in the Web Part
       {
              [string]$content = $WebPartContent.ToString()
              $oXml = New-Object System.Xml.XmlDocument
              $WebPartXml = $docXml.CreateElement(“Content”)
              $WebPartXml.set_InnerText($content)
              $oXml.AppendChild($WebPartXml)
              $CEWebPart.Content = $WebPartXml
       }
}

Questions on SharePoint for Interviews and Learning

Putting the links of some of the good blogs having good collections on SharePoint Questions which are useful for job interviews and your learning purpose. Also sharing some links where you can take up the test to check your knowledge.

Here are the links:

1. Interview Questions on SharePoint 2010 and MOSS @ http://qmoss.blogspot.com/

2. Questions on SharePoint Administration @ http://mossadmins.blogspot.com/

3. Beginner Test on SharePoint 2007 @ http://sharepointtests.blogspot.com/

4. Developer Test on SharePoint 2007 @ http://sharepointdevtest.blogspot.com/

5. Test on SharePoint 2010 @ http://sp10test.blogspot.com/

6. Test on Enterprise Search on SharePoint @ http://testonspsearch.blogspot.com/

Hope they are useful for you :)