Some SharePoint 2010 css that just baffles me

Whilst trying to apply custom .css styles to a SharePoint 2010 site with a company colour scheme.  When it came to highlighting the current on hover list item.  See picture below.

I just could not find out how to fix the issue where sometimes it appears it is 1px height out therefore the inner cell overlaps the border that is governing the row as shown in the image above.  As you can see it works on some rows but not others as the row height is not constant.

I found the css class was

td.ms-vb-title div.s4-ctx:hover
{
border-color:transparent!important;
background-color:#E7EBD6!important;
}

The background colour and border colour was set accordingly.

The height property would govern the cell.  But setting it to any height would mean it would sometimes fit in some cells but not others.  Setting it to height:auto did not work either.  Umm. 

A rather cop out way was to turn the div.s4-ctx:hover or div.s4-ctx, s4-ctx-show height to 0px.

This meant the highlight shade won't show since the div been set to 0px height, only allowing the onmouseover arrow image to show. 

Creating a copy of your master page that suppresses left menu / quicklaunch

While trying to simply create a SharePoint 2010 master page for a site collection where they simply don't need the quick launch left menus.  This was a great simple guide on how to achieve this.

http://sharepointpromag.com/sharepoint/four-ways-add-or-remove-quick-launch-menu-control

The 4 options were all great.

However, what I ended up doing was a combination of Option 1 and 2.  Which could really be documented as an option 5 approach.

In the site, I disabled the quick launch (Option 1).  This result in it not showing but the area to the left is still a blank block of space.

Then I simply created a copy of the master page that I have been using and called it MyMaster_ForNoLeftMenu

I then also copied our main css file and added 

/* Suppress Left Menu space after turn off Quick Navigation and Tree view at site level settings*/
#s4-leftpanel {
  display:none;
}
.s4-ca {
  margin-left:0px!important;
}

Saved it as myCssNoLeftMenu.css in the Style Library library folder.

In the master page I simply changed the reference to the css registration to the css file with the left hide above

 <SharePoint:CSSRegistration name="/Style Library/css/myCssNoLeftMenu.css" after="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Now to control this, simply set the site's master page to MyMaster_ForNoLeftMenu after disabling the need to show the quick launch in the site settings. 

Annoying File Opening issue with SharePoint Designer 2010

Really annoying feature or bug with SharePoint Designer 2010.  

Sometimes files not refreshing properly and not loading the latest copy saved in SharePoint and also displaying erroneous checked out/in status.

Loads of other people also found the same problem eg here

http://www.tompuleo.com/2009/04/sharepoint-designer-says-i-have-file.html

Found that even clearing the cache folders did not work.

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache

Win 7 

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache

Check in and Check out status still not working.  Latest saved file loads from SharePoint however, it seems like a Control->F5 should also be done by navigating to the folder of where the file is sitting in Designer 2010's navigation node.  At least the latest saved file seems to load.

Made sure all SharePoint Designer settings turned on the Site Collection Admin section.

But the problem does not seem to happen when it was installed on the Server that the Test SharePoint farm was sitting on... ummm

Tried adding SP2 for Designer 2010 to see whether it fixes it.  But still to no avail.  Check in and check out status still erroneous.

Clearing very large libraries the slow and hard way, but it works and site still accessible

Here is another gotcha that recently Konged us big time.

We had to delete a library that had nearly 90000 items.  To clear it from the 2nd layer recycle bin, it proved to be impossible partly because it always timed out because in our live WFE server, the IIS pool was also set to recycle frequently in order to clear the memory.

Therefore, the alternative was to restore the library.  Then in the site content manager, clear 1000 items at a time.  Then clear the recycle bin and delete 200 at a time.  Well it works and some repetitive stress syndrome started to take shape after a whole weekend spent repeating this admin task.  

NB..  Clearing the items like this at least does not result in the site being down because of the large transactional lock that happens during a big library clearance.  

Flyouts on List Items showing small details page

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Information Management Policy Bug before SP3

The information management policy on SharePoint 2007 libraries is a very useful feature.

However, there is a strange bug that has been confirmed by MS Engineers.  If you have more than 1 library yes ONE library in a site collection that has an expiry policy that has a different time span and needs to invoke a SharePoint Designer Workflow when the expiration is due.  It does not work for the second library.

Great what a surprise.  If we need it to work for more than one library, we have to develop a custom .Net component that re-iterate through the library, scan a document's last modified date to see if it is greater than say 6 months.  Then if it is older than 6 months with code fire a workflow that is on the list done in SharePoint Designer.  

However, this is confirm fixed if you have SP3.

Why can't things be easier.  ;-)

Recursive Trans-actional Issue with Workflows that Start on Create and On Modify

In SharePoint Designer if you have a multi-step workflow that fires on creation and on modified on a library. When user initially uploads, they sometimes get an error message. You will find the workflow has fired expectedly behind the scene. It happens occasionally but when it happens it persists, user can return to site and continue and the workflow has fired.

User sees an error message is "The file XXX has been modified by XXX".

Research into this with MS Engineer and the cause was identified as a “Recursive” workflow. It appears that “Item Created/Added” and “Item Modified” events are triggered when the document is uploaded and properties are set. Therefore, the workflow will be invoked twice causing SharePoint some trouble in handling them.  Umm.

The solution was to modify the workflow in SharePoint designer and have a Pause for Duration action at the start of the workflow. It can alleviate the likelihood of the workflow crashing because they are trying to run at the same time after the user uploads - triggering the Add event and when user enters and saves some additional properties for the document in the form and hit OK.

Error Output embedded into file when downloading from SharePoint

Now in SharePoint 2007 there is a strange error.  If user does not have read permission on the main site but only on the library, when they download a .csv file, an error output stream is appended to the download file.  When user opens it in Notepad or Excel it shows the error stream's XML it after the data.

Shown like below is the error that gets shown.  MS Engineers confirms this feature.  Seems to have been fixed for Sharepoint 2010.



<html>
    <head>
        <title>Runtime Error</title>
        <style>
         body {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size: .7em;color:black;}
         p {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
         b {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:bold;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
         H1 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:18pt;color:red }
         H2 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:14pt;color:maroon }
         pre {font-family:"Lucida Console";font-size: .9em}
         .marker {font-weight: bold; color: black;text-decoration: none;}
         .version {color: gray;}
         .error {margin-bottom: 10px;}
         .expandable { text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold; color:navy; cursor:hand; }
        </style>
    </head>

    <body bgcolor="white">

            <span><H1>Server Error in '/' Application.<hr width=100% size=1 color=silver></H1>

            <h2> <i>Runtime Error</i> </h2></span>

            <font face="Arial Helvetica Geneva SunSans-Regular sans-serif ">

            <b> Description: </b>An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could however be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
            <br><br>

            <b>Details:</b> To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines please create a &lt;customErrors&gt; tag within a &quot;web.config&quot; configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This &lt;customErrors&gt; tag should then have its &quot;mode&quot; attribute set to &quot;Off&quot;.<br><br>

            <table width=100% bgcolor="#ffffcc">
               <tr>
                  <td>
                      <code><pre>

&lt;!-- Web.Config Configuration File --&gt;

&lt;configuration&gt;
    &lt;system.web&gt;
        &lt;customErrors mode=&quot;Off&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;/system.web&gt;
&lt;/configuration&gt;</pre></code>

                  </td>
               </tr>
            </table>

            <br>

            <b>Notes:</b> The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the &quot;defaultRedirect&quot; attribute of the application's &lt;customErrors&gt; configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.<br><br>

            <table width=100% bgcolor="#ffffcc">
               <tr>
                  <td>
                      <code><pre>

&lt;!-- Web.Config Configuration File --&gt;

&lt;configuration&gt;
    &lt;system.web&gt;
        &lt;customErrors mode=&quot;RemoteOnly&quot; defaultRedirect=&quot;mycustompage.htm&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;/system.web&gt;
&lt;/configuration&gt;</pre></code>

                  </td>
               </tr>
            </table>

            <br>

    </body>
</html>

Index Dat file 16 meg Gotcha

We had a batch program that copied files using webDav to SharePoint locations.  Sometimes it would completely die and hay we get to hear all the noise.

It turns out its a feature of the webDav process running with the WebClient Services.  It builds a file called Index.dat in the 
C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 directory

It grows everytime more files are written to location and guess what there is an upper limit of 16 meg for the file.  Therefore, if its over that, the mechanisms crashes and you have to reset the file to get going again.

The following actions need to be performed by a Server Admin. 

1.  Login to the server where the batch program runs from.  Login with the account that the job runs under.  It caches something with the account logged in used to re-start it that suppresses any challenge and response prompt after reactivation.

2.  Open a Cmd Prompt window then run

3.  Run the following command.

net stop webclient 

net stop mrxdav 

4. Then backup the Index.dat file located in C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

5. Then delete the Index.dat file located in C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

6.  Run the following command.
net start mrxdav 

net start webclient 

7. Then quick test, On Run command box navigate to the webDav location eg \\xxx.com\test\Shared

Voila Voila, the noise starts dying.

Updated, seems like Win Server 2008 with IE10 and beyond may not suffer this issue anymore. The file names have changed too and the index.dat file is called WebcacheV01.dat.

C:\user\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\WebcacheV01.dat

There does not seem to be a file size limit to this either. http://www.sevenforums.com/browsers-mail/311407-ie10-uses-webcachev01-dat-vs-index-dat-files-how-clear-delete.html

Workflow to copy attachments from one list to another fails

SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflow hangs when attachment field is attempted to copy over from source to a destination list.  

Tried it in a SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow.  

Been told and confirm it is a feature of SharePoint 2007 by MS Engineer who can replicate and see the system message that attachments cannot be individually copied with SharePoint Designer Workflow.

NB.. So it won't let you just copy the attachments of the list item to another.  Umm and I have told the feature is still the same in SharePoint 2010.

The only way is for a custom .NET programmed solution to achieve the fype of functionality.