New Blog Location

Recently My colleague  Paul Galvin introduced me to Medium a simple story telling engine. I like the interface of Medium and I am in moving my blog to Medium. I will try to cross post here when ever I can but you can start following my blog here

Release Locked Files using Powershell

In recent times I have been writing lot of PowerShell scripts for number of different things. I believe that we all have been doing that. PowerShell is no doubt a powerful tool for not just for both developers and administrators. Microsoft moving away from features and custom solutions PowerShell is the becoming the elixir for almost everything in SharePoint. In this blog we will see a simple script that will be useful for SharePoint Administrator.

We are would have come across users complaining about file is locked by a user. The user might have edited the file last and left for a vacation and someone else is looking to edit the same file the user will see a message that the file is locked by a user for editing. How do we get lock release?

1. We could either call the person who has locked it and ask him to close it or
2. Call our best friend PowerShell to help us out here.

Which one of this is easy? I bet PowerShell because he is a true friend and will never let us down at any cost. Enough of stories let's get to the script.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

# Get Web URL from User

$webUrl = Read-Host "Enter the Web URL : "

# Get Document Library Name from the user

$listTitle = Read-Host "Enter the Document Library Name :"

# Get the Locked File Name from the user

$fileName = Read-Host "Enter the Locked File Name :"

# Get SPWeb Object

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb $webUrl

# Get the Document Library

$list = $web.Lists.TryGetLISt($listTitle)

# Construct a File URL

$fileurl = $web.Url+"/"+$list.Title+"/" + $fileName

# Get the File Handle

$spFile = $web.GetFile($fileurl)

# Get the user by who had locked the file.

$userId = $spFile.LockedByUser.ID

$user = $web.AllUsers.GetByID($userId)

# We need to Impersonate as the user who had locked the file. Get Web, List and File again as impersonated user

$impSite= New-ObjectMicrosoft.SharePoint.SPSite($web.Url, $user.UserToken);

$impWeb = $impSite.OpenWeb();

$impList = $impWeb.Lists.TryGetList($list.Title)

$impItem = $impList.GetItemById($spFile.Item.ID)

$impFile = $impItem.File

# Release the locked File

$impFile.ReleaseLock($impFile.LockId)

Using SharePoint Chrome Control in APP model

I have been working on building an SharePoint Hosted app for some time now. App as we all know is running in a separate web called app web. The app web does not inherit from the host web for its Styling or user experience. often times we hear that user wants the same user experience as SharePoint. It is actually good for the developers if we could get the SharePoint user experience because it is one less thing that we have to worry about. Users are already familiar with SharePoint user experience and we do not have to train them to use our app.

Getting the Apps to inherit the SharePoint user experience is easier said than done. There is something called Chrome Control that Microsoft exposes in SharePoint. This is the top blue bar that we are now familiar with. The blue bar provides a simple but useful navigation back to the host site from the app site. How many time we have to create either custom navigation or JavaScript code to get this done.

In this pursuit I set out to create a reusable control that help me implement the chrome control that I can just include in my Apps and not worry about writing code.In the recent times I am more than in love with AngularJs. The reason being that Angular lets me write less code which is always better for the developer and the product. So in this blog let's see how we can create the angular based chrome control that we can use in our Apps. Without further ado lets see the code and how we construct it

I am using Office 365 Developer Site to do my development. The approach works and code works pretty much same for on-premise environment as well. The app I have here is SharePoint Hosted app. This works the same way for provider hosted app and auto hosted app as well.


Now create a DIV tag in the HTML file or the default aspx page

 <div data-ng-app="chromecontrol" data-ng-controller="chromecontrolController">
     <div id="chrome_ctrl_container"></div>
</div>

The highlighted div is the container for the chrome control and since I am using angularjs I am surrounding it with the data-ng-app and data-ng-controller attributes to bootstrap my chrome control

Next we will see how we wire the code up

Create a new JS file to define the angular app. I named the file as chromecontrolapp.js

var chromecontrol = angular.module('chromecontrol', []);

I am not passing any other argument to the app and I am just defining what my app will be called which I have specified in the HTML above with data-ng-app attribute.

Next we need to define our controller. For which add another file called

chromecontrolcontroller.js

Code in the controller block

var hostWebUrl, hostWebTitle, hostWebLogoUrl, options;

chromecontrol.controller('chromecontrolController', function ($scope) {

    // get the HostWeb URL, title & logo image
    hostWebUrl = decodeURIComponent($.getQueryStringValue("SPHostUrl"));
    hostWebTitle = decodeURIComponent($.getQueryStringValue("SPHostTitle"));
    hostWebLogoUrl = decodeURIComponent($.getQueryStringValue("SPHostLogoUrl"));

    // create chrome control settings
    options = {
        siteUrl: hostWebUrl,
        siteTitle: hostWebTitle,
        appIconUrl: hostWebLogoUrl,
        appTitle: "Stock Ticker",
        settingsLinks: [
          {
              linkUrl: "../Lists/Stock Symbol",
              displayName: "LIST: Stock Symbol"
          }         
        ]
    };

    // create the chrome control
    var nav = new SP.UI.Controls.Navigation("chrome_ctrl_container", options);

    // show chrome control
    nav.setVisible(true);

    // hide top app chrome (image & app name)
    nav.setBottomHeaderVisible(false);

});

 In the controller block I am defining a global variable  for hostwebURL, hostWebTitle, hostWebLogoUrl, options.

variable options is used to define the items that will be shown when the gear icon is clicked. 

 I do not want to show my site icon and app title hence I am setting the bottomheader to be invisible using the  command

nav.setBottomHeaderVisible(false); 
 One more thing to remember to set in the app is

SPHostTitle={HostTitle}

This needs to be set in the App Manifest so that we can get the Host web title. The standard token do not contain Host title and it only bring APP URL and Host Web URL

The entire source can be downloaded from the GITHub project. For further reference please refer to MSDN