This is one of the most popular requirements I always get from clients. Especially when they have large collection of documents and want to give their user an easy way to browse document items in Data Form Web Part (DFWP).

For example, you have a list of documents displayed in DFWP and each document has "Published Date" field. How can you group DFWP items by its "Published Date" month value?

Goal

Solution

Luckily, all you need to do is to change a few lines in XSL that renders your DFWP. Here is step by step of how to do it.

1. Add "Group By" to Data Form Web Part.

Here is what your original DFWP should look like without any "Group by" on field

In SharePoint Designer (SPD), open DFWP's Common Data View Tasks and select "Sort and Group"

Select DateTime field you want to Group by, In this example it is "Published Date". "Show group header" is also selected here because this way you can see what values are used to group items

After above steps, you can see the DFWP is correctly grouped on "Published Date" field. But it treats each DateTime value as a different group value.

By default, DFWP group DateTime field based on their actual Date (YYYY-MM-DD) value. Not just year and month (YYYY-MM).

Since requirement here is to group items with same month (item with "Publsihed Date" 08/16/2008 and 08/03/2008 in this example) in same group. Further steps are needed.

2. Modify XSL

Inside the XSL that renders your DFWP, search for "dvt_groupfield". If you use "Search All" within XSL, <xsl:when test="not ($dvt_groupfield)"> is the line you want.

And you will see this section,

Change this to,

Above change is critical, that's where you specify how you want to group items in DFWP.

The original @PublishedDate value is presented in format "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ". substring(@PusblishedDate,1,7) gives us "YYYY-MM" which is what we want DFWP to group by. Note: In XSL, index starts from 1 not 0.

You will see this after above changes

Items are now group correctly, but group header still displaying incorrect text. Because In DFWP XSL, group value and header value are generated from different template. You have changed first one (in above step), and now last step is to change header value.

Just scroll down from where you changed group value in XSL a bit, and you should see this line

Change ddwrt:GenDisplayName(string(@PublishedDate)) to substring(@PublishedDate,1,7). Like following,

And you should get this as result

You can also change Group Heading to display in format YYYY-MMM (like the one in first screen shot) , or anything you like by changing above XSL.

Goal

In Part 1. I have mentioned that you can check user permissions without using any of SharePoint OM, or you can perform permission check on remote site/application. In this post you are going see a simple example of how to do it.

The goal here is to create a new web application with web service reference to SharePoint Permission web service. This web application only has one default.aspx page with two drop down lists on it.

First drop down list (DDL) pre-populates data with SharePoint users/groups name returned by GetPermissionCollection method of Permissions web service. Second DDL contains list of SPBasePermissoions permissions.

JavaScript function will be used to check if user/group selected in first DDL has permission right selected in second DDL. An image will be displayed to indicates the result.

Project Setup

Create a new ASP.NET project with standard project template and then add Web Service reference. Two image files also included in project for displaying the result.

The web service URL is http://<site url>/_vti_bin/permissions.asmx and we named it SharePointPermissionsService

Coding

Create Drop Down Lists

First div contains two drop down lists. One is ASP DropDownList control and its options are loaded from server side. And other one is normal html drop down list with options from the permissions table from Part 1.

The first ASP DropDownList control is pre-populated with following code

Remember, you must make sure the user running the context has permission to access SharePoint web service. Or you can use

p.Credentials = <create new credential here> to call web service with specific credential in the code above.

GetPermissionCollection returns data in following format

Two drop down lists will be displayed as following

Create permission check function

Permission DDL has its onClick event registered with DoPermissionCheck() JavaScript function. DoPermissionCheck() is where you perform bitwise operation to compare user/group mask with each permission.

DoPermissionCheck() does four things

1. Get selected values of both DDL

2. Convert selected decimal value from ddlUserGroup DDL to Hex base16.

3. Get high and low masks from user mask and permission mask (in Hex base 16)

4. Perform bitwise AND operation on two high masks and two low masks.

If you look closer, you will find it has similar implementation to HasRights(), EqualRights(), SetCurrentPermMaskFromString() functions from CORE.JS in SharePoint. SharePoint uses these three JavaScript functions to check user permissions (like what we doing here) to display correct list item context menu for user.

Now you can select different user/group and permission to see the image change.

And of course you can implement above method in C# to perform permission check on server side. You can also extend this control to check user permissions on list level. (If your list does not inherit permissions from parent web site)

Just change web service call to GetPermissionCollection(<list name>, "List");

Easy, isn't it?

Ok, you probably do not want to create world clock web part from scratch. Many free ones over Internet. Not to mention the very popular world clock web part from "bamboo Solutions".

But if you really want to create one by yourself for whatever the reason is, or you just want show the local time for employees working in different cities around the world (in their profile page, maybe). It can be done easily without to use any external web services, or hack your way through windows registry to get time zones list.

Yes, thanks to SharePoint OM. You can get all the information you want from Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

SPRegionalSettings.GlobalTimeZones

It returns you a collection of SPTimeZones objects used in Windows SharePoint Services.

In above code sample, it loop through each SPTimeZone inside SPTimeZoneCollection. Writes ID, current date time (in local server date time format) and description in console.

This is what you will get

As you can see, my local time in Sydney, Australia is Thursday, August 21, 2008 4:01pm. And time in Tokyo, Japan is 08/21/2008 3:01pm. In Auckland, New Zealand is 08/21/2008 6:01pm. Which are correct!

Basically that's all you need to create world clock web part, or date time conversion control in SharePoint site. You can either have GlobalTimeZones collection as drop down list for user to select the time zone for displaying date time. Or you can create a SharePoint list mapping between cities name with time zone ID in GolbalTimeZones collection.

Here are the links to previous two parts of the series

Part 1. Build your own data source for Data Form Web Part

Part 2. Use XSLT generated from SharePoint Designer to display data 

If you build a Data Form Web Part with customized data source (i.e. data source that does cross-sites querying), you've probably noticed the filtering on column headers does not work. In this part of customize Data Form Web Part series, you will see how this problem can be fixed by extend your custom Data Form Web Part code a bit more.

Before click on "Form Name" column header, there are two items displayed under it.

After click on "Form Name" column header, no available filter data returned.

The Problem

Before we going into how to fix it. You must first understand what is causing this problem. And the answer simple. Because with the customized data source you just created, the original Data From Web Part methods that used to handle filtering are no longer to be able to perform filtering and render filter value correctly.

You will see how it works behind the scene from the following three methods. These methods are called after you clicked on any filterable column header.

RaiseCallBackEvent

This method assigns event argument to the web part (Data Form Web Part in this example) after callback event has been raised.

Event argument is a string variable represent in following format: (i.e. clicked on "Title" column header)

"__filter={Form Name @FormName x:string;1033 g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb}"

As you can see, it contains column name and web part ClientID - g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb.

GetCallbackResult

After RaiseCallBackEvent, this method gets called. It first check if raised callback event is for filtering event on column headers. If so, it strips out the filtering string

"Form Name @FormName x:string;1033 g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb"

And pass it to DoCallBackFilters as an input argument.

DoCallBackFilters

DoCallBackFIlters prepares callback result that will be used for rendering filtering drop down list on column header. The correct returned string should look like this:

<SELECT>
<OPTION href="__doPostBack('g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb','NotUTF8;__filter={@FormName=##dvt_all##}')"></OPTION>
<OPTION href="__doPostBack('g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb','NotUTF8;__filter={@FormName=Temp page}')">Temp page</OPTION>
<OPTION href="__doPostBack('g_548009f0_beeb_4e3c_a4a6_71fc338cc8cb','NotUTF8;__filter={@FormName=Test Page}')">Test Page</OPTION>
</SELECT>

Note! This is where you get empty result when you clicked on column header. Because this method cannot process your customized cross-sites query data source, it returned empty string instead to GetCallbackResult.

Solution

DoCallBackFilters is a private method and there is no way to extend it to make it work the way you wanted. The only option here is to override GetCallbackResult method and make it to call new DoCallbackFilters replacement method. (CustomizedDoCallBackFIlters in this example)

Override above method with following implementation.

Inside CustomizedDoCallBackFilters method you can build result data with any logic you like. As long as it is in correct format. I suggest you to follow the same logic of how you've built your data source. To make sure data displayed in column headers always consistent with actual displayed items in Data From Web Part.

More Details

I will explain what should your final result data look like. As you can see in above, it follows this format:

Each <OPTION/> element inside <SELECT/> has only one attribute "herf". Except first <OPTION/> element served special purpose and I will explain it later.

But first let's see the break down to the "herf" attribute value

Only difference in each line are the values used to display on the UI drop down list and used for filtering PostBack result.

The first <OPTION/> is used to indicate whether filtering has been done on current column. To toggle the flag you just need to assign 1 to this <OPTION/> element

That's all. It is pretty much how you fix filtering on column header problem. Just remember to return your final result data in GetCallbackResult().

In summary.

1. Get Callback argument with all the necessary data (field name and control client id).

2. Use above input argument to build result data using any code logic you like.

3. return data in GetCallbackResult() method.

Hope this post helps you to get what you want.

James

MOSS Faceted Search is a great SharePoint search extension project on CodePlex. It provides following features (copy from its CodePlex site)

• Grouping search results by facet
• Displaying a total number of hits per facet value
• Refining search results by facet value
• Update of the facet menu based on refined search criteria
• Displaying of the search criteria in a Bread Crumbs
• Ability to exclude the chosen facet from the search criteria
• Flexibility of the Faceted search configuration and its consistency with MOSS administration

However, there are still some known issues exist due to this project does not update and release regularly.

HTML Encoding

An issue I experienced was HTML string encoding/decoding problem. After I added faceted search web part to search result page and searched for something, it returns result like following.

As you can see first facet value in both "Refine by Title" and "Refine by role" sections are empty. Only number of hits displayed. And it is because Faceted web part does not perform HTML encode/decode properly. It can be easily spotted by closer inspection of page's HTML source.

First empty facet value is causing by "<No Title>" rendered as html tag, which is not recognized by browser. And the second empty facet value is with half-open "<No Position defi..." also treated as malformed html tag.

To fix this problem, you have to modify Common\Templates.cs source code file. perform HttpUtility.HtmlEncode  for facet.DisplayName before assign it as link.Text

After you re-deploy fixed version of the feature and web part, the search result should now look like

Everything look fine now? If you now click on the link you just fixed as followed above steps. You will see this in returned refine search result page.

HTML Decoding

Yes, the problem is obvious. Whatever we encoded, we must decode it. Otherwise Faceted search web part will pass encoded query value to do refine search. And it will not return correct result (or no result at all, since encoded string will not look pretty).

To fix this problem you will need to modify Common\Utility.cs source code file. Do HttpUtility.HtmlDecode for query.Properties[property] before add it to keywords ArrayList.

If you followed all above steps you should now see correct refined search keyword and results.