Assembled from a post here on SharePoint 2007 maximum limitations:
| Entity |
Max Value |
| Site Name |
128 Characters |
| Site URL |
255 Characters |
| Display Name |
128 Characters |
| Connection String |
384 Characters |
| Email Address |
128 Characters |
| Version Numbers |
64 Characters |
| Virtual Server Friendly Name |
64 Characters |
| SQL Database Name |
123 Characters |
| SQL Database Column |
128 Characters |
| SendEmail Activity Email Body |
2048 Characters |
| SQL Database Table Name |
128 Characters |
| SQL Role Name |
128 Characters |
| Server Name |
128 Characters |
| Windows User Name |
300 Characters |
| Windows Password |
300 Characters |
| Dependencies per Object |
32 Objects |
| Zone Enumeration Value |
4 Zones |
| Default SQL Timeout |
300 Seconds |
| Number of Simultaneous Workflows that can be run* |
15 |
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SharePoint uses lot of comlicated underlying schemas, delimiters and formats when storing field data into the database. Unfortunately, you need to access different fields in diferent ways! Below are the techniques I’ve used to access field information using best pratices…. kudos to this post for most of the technical beginning:
http://sharepointcodeblock.blogspot.com/2008/07/properly-populating-and-retrieving.html
I’ve added what I’ve learned since to try to make this as complete as possible.
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OnTaskChanged Workflow
My latest adventure in workflow development had to do with checking the status of a task my workflow had initiated. Using a State Machine workflow I create a task and want to transition to another state after the task’s status is set to completed. See my workflow to the left to get the genral idea. I wanted to use a CodeCondition check in the IfElseActivity Branch to determine if I should transition to the next state. I couldn’t seem to find a simple way to check the “Status” property.
Turns out you can’t reference the “Status” property easily because it is an “ExtendedProperty” of the task. I came up with this method to check the status of a SharePoint task using the following code snippet to return a “True” if the status is set to “Completed”
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Here is a VB.Net code snippet to delete all of the tasks associated with a SharePoint Workflow. I needed to be able delete all of the tasks associated with the workflow when my state machine workflow changed to a different state. This technique worked for me, simply make the procedure below a “ExecuteCode” method for a Code Activity:
Private Sub RemoveEscalationTask(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
Dim taskcollection As SPWorkflowTaskCollection = workflowProperties.Workflow.Tasks
Dim taskindex As Integer = taskcollection.Count
Dim thetask As SPWorkflowTask
Try
' Cycle through all of the escalation tasks and delete them
While taskindex > 0
thetask = taskcollection(taskindex - 1)
thetask.Delete()
taskindex = taskindex - 1
End While
Catch ex As Exception
End Try
End Sub
Recently, I was debugging one of my SharePoint workflows using Visual Studio 2008 and could not figure out why breakpoints I had set within my code were not firing. In a previous post, I talked about reasons why your delay activity might not be firing at all but what if your activity fires but your breakpoints do not?
By default when inter-actively debugging a workflow, Visual Studio attaches to the IIS worker process, w3wp.exe. If you use any “Delay” activities within your workflow, this gets triggered and ran by the Windows SharePoint Services Timer process, owstimer.exe. Because the owstimer.exe process is loading and executing a separate copy of the assembly from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) visual studio is not monitoring the correct instance of the assembly for breakpoints.
This complicates the debug process a little. You cannot simply step through the code execution from beginning to end. Instead, as the developer, you need to have a good understanding of what to attach to when debugging events triggered by the owstimer process or w3wp process. Follow the procedure below to attach visual studio to the owstimer process and allow breakpoints to be handled by the correct copy of the assembly. (more…)
I have some fields in my list that I do not want the end user’s to see when presented with my List’s the NewForm.aspx page. I played around with a whole bunch of different techniques to do this. Seems like this should be something easy enough to do with SharePoint Designer doesn’t it? Hide the default ListFormWebPart then add a new custom list form and delete the columns you do not want to display. Although this works there were all kinds of problems dealing with Attachments. When creating a new item, I would get a nasty error:
Failed to get value of the “Attachments” column from the “Attachments” field type control. See details in log. Exception message: Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx)..
…. see this post for all kinds of problems with attachment functionality and custom forms.
I stumbled upon Scott Wheeler’s awesome post here: (more…)
Really struggled with this one for a few days. Had a Visual Studio 2008 workflow I was developing and was just trying to get a Delay Activity to fire during a state machine event activity. Just could not seem to get the Delay activity to wake up. Below is the high-level view of my state machine workflow:
State Machine Workflow Diagram
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After you have created a Custom New Form for your customized list or library using SharePoint designer, you’ll notice that the default action when clicking on the “Cancel” or the “Save” button is to add the item to the list but not to navigate away from the form. Most people would prefer to have the Form return to the previous screen when at least the “Cancel” button is pressed. I’m going to step through how to perform this customization using SharePoint Designer. I’m assuming you already have a custom New Form produced that will input new items into your custom list or library. If not check out my previous post here.
When SharePoint navigates to a default form for a list or library, the URL of the originating page is passed as a query string called “Source”. Use the procedure below to make use of this query string variable to provide navigation after the form has been submitted.
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I wanted to document how to use SharePoint Designer to create a customized “NewForm.aspx” so that you can modify what list column fields are available for a new item. I recently wanted to collect information for a new list item but didn’t want the user to be able to fill out all the fields on the out of the box new list item form. This is a technique that can be used to only display certain fields or to customize the look and feel of the page.
1. To start with open the existing default “NewForm.aspx” page and save a copy with a different name (ie. NewFormModified.aspx”.
Note: Do not modify the existing page. There are a lot of troubles associated with getting rid of this first form. Just create another.
2. Select the default “ListFormWebPart” on your renamed “NewForm.aspx” web page.
Webpart Properties for DefaultWebpart
3, Right click on the “ListFormWebPart” and hide the web part by checking the “Hidden” check box in the “Layout” section.
Note: Do not delete the existing webpart!! Once again there are a lot of troubles associated with getting rid of this existing default webpart. Just hide it and create another.
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By default when you select “Integrated Windows Authentication” for your IIS 6.0 website it is setup for “Negotiate (Kerberos), NTLM”.
Integrated Windows Authentication Image
Sometimes, you do not want Kerberos to be attempted (more…)