Sharepoint Ribbon on Layout Pages Part 1

Sharepoint 2010 is different from MOSS in many ways and one of the feature that is more visible is Office like ribbon interface. Ribbon gives an office like feel to Sharepoint and creates a familiar impression among users. Ribbon is available in Home page and In Edit, Display and New Form out the box. Adding additional actions to the default ribbon is easy and it is a straight forward approach of creating a new custom action.

 There are times when we need to create custom pages that live in layouts which will be sometimes be assigned as a custom forms for Lists and libraries. There is direct approach to have ribbon and controls added to these pages similar to Out of the Box Ribbon.  This requires some additional lines of coding to create and add it to these pages. In here I am show you can add ribbon to any layout pages and how you can wire up events to these buttons that go into these ribbons.

Step 1:

Create a Sharepoint Project in Visual Studio 2010.

Step 2
Add an Empty Element File

Step 3
Add Custom Action for Ribbon as Shown below


 <CustomAction Id="BTRibbion" Location="CommandUI.Ribbon" Title="Application Page" Sequence="311">
    <CommandUIExtension>
      <CommandUIDefinitions>
        <CommandUIDefinition Location="Ribbon.Tabs._children">
          <Tab Title="My Edit" Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab" Description="Application Page Tab" Sequence="11">
            <Scaling Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Scaling">
              <MaxSize GroupId="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup" Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Scaling.Data.MaxSize" Sequence="11" Size="LargeLarge" />
              <MaxSize Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Scaling.Actions.MaxSize" Sequence="12" GroupId="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup" Size="LargeLarge"/>
              <Scale GroupId="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup" Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Scaling.Data.MediumMedium" Sequence="21" Size="MediumMedium"/>
              <Scale Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Scaling.Actions.Popup" Sequence="22" GroupId="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup" Size="Popup" />
            </Scaling>
            <Groups Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.Groups">
              <Group Title="Main Group" Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup" Description="Main Group"
                     Sequence="11" Template="Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2">
                <Controls Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup.Controls">
                  <Button Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup.Controls.SaveActivity" Sequence="1" TemplateAlias="o1" ToolTipDescription="Save" ToolTipTitle="Save"
                          LabelText="Save" Image32by32Left="-256" Image32by32Top="-416" Image32by32="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap32x32.png"
                          Image16by16Left="0" Image16by16Top="-112" Image16by16="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap16x16.png" Command="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup.Controls.SaveActivity" />
                 
                  <Button Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup.Controls.CancelActivity" Sequence="2" TemplateAlias="o1" ToolTipDescription="Cancel" ToolTipTitle="Cancel"
                          LabelText="Cancel" Image32by32Left="-288" Image32by32Top="-448" Image32by32="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap32x32.png"
                          Image16by16Left="-248" Image16by16Top="0" Image16by16="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap16x16.png" Command="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.MainGroup.Controls.CancelActivity" />
                </Controls>
              </Group>
              <Group Title="Actions Group" Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup" Description="Actions Group"
                     Sequence="21" Template="Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2" >
                <Controls Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup.Controls">
                  <Button Id="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup.Controls.DeleteActivity" Sequence="1" TemplateAlias="o1" ToolTipDescription="Delete" ToolTipTitle="Delete"
                         LabelText="Delete" Image32by32Left="-288" Image32by32Top="-448" Image32by32="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap32x32.png"
                         Image16by16Left="-248" Image16by16Top="0" Image16by16="/_layouts/$Resources:core,Language;/images/formatmap16x16.png" Command="Ribbon.BT.AppPages.Tab.ActionsGroup.Controls.Click"/>
                </Controls>
              </Group>
            </Groups>
          </Tab>
        </CommandUIDefinition>
      </CommandUIDefinitions>
     
    </CommandUIExtension>
   
  </CustomAction>


The Custom Action Section has 3 parts

1. Command UI Definition Section to mark the control as Ribbon
2. Group Section for grouping the Controls in the Ribbon
3.Control Section which holds the control and there actions

If you note that I haven't added the CommandUI Handlers section that attaches event to these buttons. The reason for not adding the command UI Handlers is to make these Ribbon control re-useable. I prefer to add it in the code behind of the page but you could always add the UI Handler section that does post back or another operation.

Part 2 : SharePoint Ribbon on Layout Page

Restore Deleted Site Collection using power shell

Usually  I do not had a backup of my  my development machine as am not too much worried about information in the site collection. I do not mind creating a new site collection in my dev environmnet, but this time I have built this document management application and had some configuration done which I am due  to present in the conference and accidentally deleted my site collection. Now is a big problem because i only have an hour for the conference where we are showing this product to potential customers. I felt really bad for not having a backup. I was scrambling for help and started to build new site collection and deploying my solution, my friend walked into my office to get ready for the presentation. He saw me configuring the system again and asked me about the situation. I explained him what happened. He is a developer working on the same product and he brought to my notice about our previous presentation for our technical team about PowerShell commands in Sharepoint. we had to update our power shell  presentation then with few new commands that was part of SP1 release.Here is a savior and command is nothing but to restore deleted site collection. 

When you delete the site collection there is now a Site Collection Recycle Bin in Sharepoint 2010 from where you restore it using this command. I have included the Screen shot and the command below. I wanted to pen it down here because I will now remember and would be helpful for some one somewhere in the world.

Commands




Get-SPDeletedSite

Get Deleted Site

Get-SPDeletedSite | where{$_.SiteId -eq “Guid of Site ID″} | Restore-SPDeletedSite

Restore Deleted Site collection

You can find the reference to these Commands Here

Export and Import Site in Sharepoint

 Many have faced a situation of exporting a site and importing in another site collection. There are times where you need to move a subsite in a site collection to another site collection or into a subsite of same site collection. Recently I was involved in the project where the client moves the site into a subsite or reversal more often. They in fact  wanted this as a part of the application itself. Further, they don't want to run STSADM or power shell command and depend on IT for doing this. To add complexity to the situation the client had 2 different environment

1. Hosted externally
2. Hosted Internally

The reason for having this set up is the client do not have a big IT team to manage the infrastructure as external environment hosts some of there client information and they wanted to have backup and disaster recovery capabilities, which they don't want to own.

Having given the background of situation now let us see how we can achieve this operation. The easiest solution I think and which I worked on to implement was using Sharepoint webservices. This I think is good solution because there is less code to manage and there is a huge support from Microsoft as it is there code and this approach can also be used from Client object model.

Code :

                   SharepointSiteServices.Sites siteWs = new SharepointSiteServices.Sites();
                   siteWs.Url = SPContext.Current.Web.Url + "/_vti_bin/sites.asmx";

                   siteWs.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

                  string[] datafiles = new string [] { site.Url + "/TemplateLibrary/"+ SPContext.Current.Web.Name +".cmp"};

                  int i = siteWs.ExportWeb(SPContext.Current.Web.Name, SPContext.Current.Web.Url, site.Url + "/TemplateLibrary", true, true, true, Int32.MaxValue);

                  siteWs.Url = site.Url + "/_vti_bin/sites.asmx";

                  int j = siteWs.ImportWeb(SPContext.Current.Web.Name, site.Url + "/" + SPContext.Current.Web.Name, datafiles, site.Url + "/TemplateLibrary", true, true);

The code above shows how you can export and import the site or subsite. But the things that needs to considered are

There is minimum documentation for the web service calls export and import opeartion. I managed to get a PDF document that contains the error codes and implementation details from technet after tearing google away for any sort of information. Finally i got hold of a former microsoft guy and he shared this PDF with me. I am uploading it any body else who need it may use it.

• Web services needs to pointed to the site that needs to exported
• set the web service credentials. May be you can run with elevated privileges if you know this operation is going to be performed by some one else in the system other than administrator.
• datafiles which is string array represents the file name that you want to use when exporting the site. I am using the default site name as file name here. You can change this to any thing you want. Important thing that needs to conscious of is the path of the file name should be a SharePoint library. It does not let you pick a directory path.
• Change the Site URL for the import site and now you can import the sites.

 Reference

Sites Web Service