AndyGett on SharePoint and Other Business Software

Converting a SharePoint Site to Chinese

AndyGett — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:38:00 GMT

Veni; vidi; vici (Overview)

Working in a new language and character set, our team saw and conquered several surprises. This post looks at conditional CSS, forcing IE 9 to behave like IE 9 and tweaking Notepad++ to display Chinese characters. (Mr. Connelly and Ms. Snider, I hope you are pleased that I snuck some Latin into my blog post.)

Internet Explorer 8 has no Default Chinese Font

If you ever tried to view a site with Chinese characters using Internet Explorer 8, you may have witnessed the lack of a default font for Chinese – nearly all characters render as boxes.

Here is the word news in Chinese using the default font: 新闻In Internet Explorer, it looks something like . Not good. Chinese is supported in Internet Explorer, but you have to tell it that is what you want to use. So, we could ask all of our Internet Explorer users to click (in IE 8) View > Encoding > More > Chinese Simplified, but there is a better way.

This is the word "news" in Chinese using the Arial Unicode MS font: 新闻. It renders on Internet Explorer. So – we're done with the font issue, right? Not so fast. It turns out that this is one ugly font. We had passionate complaints from Chinese readers about it.

Conditional CSS Files for IE 8

Because all of the other browsers rendered the Chinese characters in the different fonts on our site, we ended up checking for Internet Explorer 8 in our master page:

IE8.css contains the font family over and over wherever a font was specified in the main css file.

font-family:Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

For example:

body {font-family:Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

This makes only IE 8 users suffer the hideous font.

IE 9

Internet Explorer 9 renders Chinese characters better than IE 8. However, SharePoint puts IE 9 into IE 8 mode via this line in the master page:

Removing this makes Chinese characters render better, but it also breaks some SharePoint functionality such as people picker assignments (see Matt Oslen's fix here) and "Send To" from a document library.

Traditional and Simplified Chinese Characters

Most Chinese characters are always drawn pretty much the same way, but some Chinese characters may be represented in traditional or simplified form. Frustratingly, most fonts in most browsers use a mix of traditional and simplified characters making it difficult to settle on one. We wanted to achieve 100% simplified characters, but this proved elusive. Internet Explorer 9 with the Conditional CSS File only for IE 8 (so that Arial Unicode MS is not used) worked the best using Arial and Helvetica:

	Chrome	Safari	Firefox	Excel / Word 2007	IE 9	IE 9 Remove AUM	IE 7	Excel 2003
直 (means Straight)	Traditional	Traditional	Traditional	Traditional	Traditional	Simplified	Traditional	Traditional
曾 (means Once)	Traditional	Traditional	Simplified	Simplified	Traditional	Simplified	Traditional	Simplified

Text Editor – Notepad++ Tweaks

Some of this site's content is driven by list items and content editor web parts. Copying and pasting from a robust text editor makes life much easier for changing such content. My choice is Notepad++, a free source code editor. Out of the box, if you start a new file, the default encoding is ANSI which does not work with Chinese characters. Once again, working on Windows XP, I had a problem with block characters instead of Chinese showing up. Once again, Arial Unicode MS to the rescue. Here are the steps:

1. Set your encoding to UTF-8: Menu > Encoding > Encode in UTF-8.
2. Determine or set the language of your current file. For example Menu > Language > XML.
3. Use the Style Configurator to set the font to @Arial Unicode MS any place you are using Chinese Characters. E.g., Menu > Settings > Style Configurator … > Language: XML > Style: DEFAULT > Font Style: @Arial Unicode MS.

4. Repeat step 3 for other language types you need, such as HTML.

By setting only the default text to this font, you still get nice spacing from the fixed-width Courier new font, and you will also see any place where Chinese characters are used as attributes because they will show up as blocks on XP.

One weird thing about Arial Unicode MS in Notepad++ is that it rotates the characters counterclockwise by 90 degrees, but they still read left to right. Here is "news" rendered in Notepad++ 6.1.1 .

Exposing Large Files Like Videos in a SharePoint Document Library Using IIS Virtual Directory

AndyGett — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:00:00 GMT

I wrote an unpublished post before SharePoint 2010 was released on how to create a feature to store items in a document library on the file system. The benefit of this is that all web front ends have access to the video without any further configuration. The downside is that all web front ends store a copy of the file on the file system. If you have a 500 MB video, this may not be ideal or even possible. Also, each time you want to post new video(s), you must create a new feature.

Another option is to expose the content on IIS via a virtual directory. This works in WSS 3.0, MOSS and all versions of SharePoint 2010.

Here are the steps

Preparation: decide which account will impersonate the current user. The SharePoint search crawl account will suffice, but whichever account you use, you will need to know the password.
- If you are using (or are ok with) anonymous access, consider uploading your videos to a public host like Youtube or Vimeo to ease the burden on the SharePoint Farm's network.
If you have not done so, create a directory that IIS can see. If you have multiple web front ends, a single shared directory for all of them is desirable.
Give the account from Step 1 read permissions to the directory on the file system.
Set up a virtual directory called video (or whatever) under the SharePoint IIs site pointing to where the videos and other files are.
In IIS, right click on the virtual directory > manage > permissions. Impersonate the account chosen in step 1.
Repeat the steps for all web front ends in the farm.

Notes and Considerations

This is not a "no brainer" for all situations; it's a brainer – you may need to consider some things.

Security

The above process allows authenticated users access all the files in the virtual directory.
You may modify web.config file(s) to allow and deny to files and folders.
Permissions may not be set using SharePoint groups, only AD and local users. is available

Remote blob storage (RBS)

Remote blob storage (RBS) is for specific content databases.
This means that if you want to go this route, it will be for all documents in the site collection.
RBS is not backed up in your regular SQL Server backup which means that a common primary goal of backing up documents is broken. This could be mitigated by dedicating a site collection with its own content database set up for RBS to host the videos.

Advantages of using a feature

If you have multiple web front ends, the virtual directory must be configured for each of them manually whereas the feature will do this for you.
The feature allows finely tuning permissions using the OOTB SharePoint UI.

Gigantic SharePoint SQL Server LDF Files

AndyGett — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:14:00 GMT

Does This Ring a Bell?

SharePoint 2010 was set up months ago, and now the database LDF files are huge. Server hard disk is full or nearly so. Symptoms can be

Can no longer upload (sometimes just larger) files to the SharePoint document libraries
Other updates in SharePoint do not work properly or at all
Hard disk is full

You Can't Get There from Here

It seems like every blog and forum post dive into topics that a true database administrator (DBA) would know or care about. And even when you do understand what they are saying, the solutions provided are not trivial or possible. Fear not. Here is…

A Quick Fix:

If you are not a DBA, here are some steps you can take to get your SharePoint site working again. For each database where the log files are big (say, over 10 GB)

1. Put your database into simple recovery mode
2. Shrink your LDF file(s).

Method 1: SQL GUI Steps via Server Management Studio

Right-click the database > Properties > Options > Recovery Model
Change from Full to Simple
Ok
Right-click the same database again > Tasks > Shrink > Files
Change the File Type dropdown from Data to Log
Ok

Method 2: Scripting

USE

GO

ALTER DATABASE SharePoint_Config SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(N'', 1)

GO

For example,

USE SharePoint_Config

GO

ALTER DATABASE SharePoint_Config SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(N'SharePoint_Config_log', 1)

GO

For items with dashes like those with a GUID, surround the database name with []. I use 100 (MB) here for the target file size in case I want to go back to full recovery for this database.

USE [WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB_cd98775b-b19e-4376-b782-c8d7045a79e4]

GO

ALTER DATABASE [WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB_cd98775b-b19e-4376-b782-c8d7045a79e4] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(N'WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB_cd98775b-b19e-4376-b782-c8d7045a79e4_log', 100)

GO

The first parameter in SHRINKFILE() is the logical file name, not the physical filename that you see on the file system. Sometimes the logical log file is not . You can determine the logical file name of the log via Right-click on database > Properties > Files

After clicking pressing F5 or clicking Execute to run the script, click on the Messages tab to see if there were any issues.

Note that this removes the ability to restore to a point in time which means that you may restore to the last full backup.

What to do long-term

Consider recovery model. There are two options:
1. Simple means you can restore to the last time you made a backup which is what most people think of when they think "backup and restore". The above process puts the database into Simple recovery model.
2. Full allows doing the restore like in the Simple model. But is also allows one to do a a point in time to restore using both the last backup and the log files since the last backup. Follow the links below in the References section to learn more.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345382.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.07.sqlbackup.aspx

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi/archive/2007/02/25/leaking-roof-and-file-shrinking.aspx
http://www.karaszi.com/SQLServer/info_dont_shrink.asp

Enabling CKS EBE Comments Alerts

AndyGett — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:57:00 GMT

One of my production blogs (this one, actually) was not sending alerts about comments. I have set up several blogs using CKS EBE, and fortunately I was able to use another blog to debug it. The Contact Email value in Blog Settings is not enough, and in fact has nothing to do with it. You just set up a normal SharePoint alert for the Comments list.

Navigate to the Comments list > Actions – Alert me
Change Type - New items are added
Send Alerts for These Changes - Someone else changes an item

If you have not done so, SharePoint prompt you to set the email address for your login account. Easy enough, but I'll probably forget this the next time it happens if I don't note it now.

Twitter on SharePoint

AndyGett — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:31:00 GMT

Showing a list of Twitter.com tweets from a Twitterer on SharePoint is as easy as pasting some HTML and Javascript into a Content Web Part, available in WSS. I created a family Twitter account because sometimes blog entries are just too much to say, the baby now weighs 10 pounds. I had initially considered making a simple SharePoint list and presenting items that way, but then settled leveraging Twitter and all its extra functionality. The one drawback is if Twitter is down or goes away completely.

I first tried consuming the Twitter RSS feed using a Dataview web part and SharePoint Designer, but fortunately (sic), I had some trouble figuring out how to display the tweet times in my local time zone, EST or GMT -0500. The RSS delivers the tweet times in GMT +0000, e.g., Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:13:20 +0000. I found some XSLT to deal with it (http://ftrain.com/xslt_001.html is overkill), but it was messier than I cared to deal with.

Then I found http://twitter.com/badges/which_badge where you can choose Flash, or HTML + Javascript, which is what I chose (http://twitter.com/badges/html). As the Twitter badge page suggests, I broke the code apart, putting the

into one content web part, and putting the two Javascript lines

into the very bottom, right-most zone so that it would load last, and not prevent the rest of the page from loading if Twitter is slow or absent. I kind of liked the "follow me on Twitter" link that they show in the preview on the badge page. For whatever reason, this link is missing from the HTML code, but this line

follow us on Twitter

fixes the problem.

On the home page, at my wife's request, our tweets are now front and center at the top of the page. It shows a maximum of seven tweets. However, the code snippet has count as a parameter. I used a different account which already had lots of tweets, and was able to get 45 at once. So from the home page's content, I linked to a new web part page that shows up to 150 of our tweets. I figure beyond that, the page is going to be too long. This is one big advantage over RSS which appears to support a maximum of just 20.

A peek under the hood of the Javascript reveals Javascript + JSON fetching and presenting the data. It appears that one could easily customize the strangely named blogger.js. You could present some different looks like actual date & time (beware the time zone offset mentioned in the 2^nd paragraph) and add in some of the non-presented AJAX content such as the Twitter image and number of followers.

Web.config Changes for Debugging ASPX Page’s Codebehind in SharePoint

AndyGett — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:27:00 GMT

Instead of getting the "user-friendly", but frustrating-to-a-developer message "An error has occurred", use these two steps to receive the actual error when developing in SharePoint. Works for both MOSS and WSS.

Show the call stack
Change
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
to
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="true" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
Set custom errors to False
Change

<customErrors mode="On" />
to
<customErrors mode="Off" />

Hiding a List Item from Anonymous Users

AndyGett — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:02:00 GMT

Karen asked that I remove one of the links from the gift registry on the internet WSS family site. Instead of removing it, I decided to hide it from anonymous users. Note that during this process, we are warned that "You are about to create unique permissions for this item. Changes made to the parent folder or list permissions will no longer effect this list item". This is an important concept to understand before proceeding.

Navigate to the list.
In the context menu available when you hover over the link, click "Manage Permissions" > Actions > Edit Permissions
Click Ok in response to the warning
Click the check box next to Visitors
Actions > Remove User Permissions > Ok

Now anonymous users can't see this one link, and if Karen ever asks to undo this action so that we can see the link again, I can navigate to the link item, click Actions > Inherit Permissions.

Date Formulas in SharePoint Calculated Fields

AndyGett — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:53:00 GMT

Microsoft provides a nice compilation of Examples of common formulas, but it does not work as advertised with WSS. I have not tried it in MOSS. Let's say there is a date column named ExpirationDate and an integer named NotificationMonths which represents the number of months before the expiration date that we want the notification in our calculated field NotificationDate.

Simple arithmetic using a date and an integer adds the number of days. If ExpirationDate is 10/31/2009, and NotificationMonths is 6, the formula

=ExpirationDate- NotificationMonths

yields 10/26/2009, but what we really want is 5/1/2009 (4/31 does not exist). The link from the first sentence of this post implies that

=DATE(YEAR(ExpirationDate),MONTH(ExpirationDate)-NotificationMonths,DAY(ExpirationDate))

ought to do exactly this, but instead it gives the error "The formula refers to a column that does not exist. Check the formula for spelling mistakes or change the non-existing column to an existing column."

The solution is to use braces around the field names:

=DATE(YEAR([ExpirationDate]), MONTH([ExpirationDate])-[NotificationMonths], DAY([ExpirationDate]))

Link to Slide Show from Pictures DVWP Rollup

AndyGett — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:28:00 GMT

In addition to the blog rollup’s (see previous post), I am rolling up my top-level picture folders in a picture library called Pictures. We thought the best user experience would be viewing the slide shows of a particular library. I was adding a label of “In the Photo Album menu, click Actions > View Slide Show”, but the menu is hard to find, and jeez, Andy, can’t you just make the link go straight to the slide show instead of linking to the thumbnails? Well, the answer is “yes”.

There is a slideshow.aspx page in the Forms subfolder of picture libraries. It takes a query-string parameter named RootFolder to know where to start. Since all my “albums” are one level deep (no nesting of folders), the items returned by the data source are all we need. @FileRef field contains the “URL Path” of the item. So the link of our tag generated by the DataForm WebPart’s XSL needs to look something line /Pictures/Forms/slideshow.aspx&RootFolder={@FileRef}. After some playing around, this does the trick:

I still like the idea of having the thumbnail, so I added

before the slideshow link within the same column. Note that &nbps; must be explicitly defined in XSL. Using instead is easier. Detail.gif is OOTB SharePoint graphic that seemed to capture the idea of a grid of thumbnails.

To round it all out, I show the created date sans time stamp of the album, right justified in the second column:

SharePoint Object Names – No Spaces

AndyGett — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:15:00 GMT

I have always avoided using spaces in object names, even in my file names and directory names. This stems from a programmer's background and a general dislike of seeing things like http://somedomain.com/home%20page.htm. It also makes DOS commands and batch files easier.

It's similar with SharePoint. It allows Content Types and site column names to contain spaces, but when you want to use them in CAML, XML or XLS via a Data Form Web Part, a column named "Expiration Date" turns into "Expiration_x0020_Date". However, you can initially name such a field using the "camel back" format, i.e., ExpirationDate, and then rename the field to "Expiration Date". The internal field name remains ExpirationDate, but end users see it with the space. The few extra seconds it takes to rename such fields is worth it.