May 2004 - Posts

• SharePoint Database/List Best Practices???

  Anyone out there have a reference to what the best practices for programming SharePoint are?  Specifically, how much normalization one should use in their database/lists?  Here's my scenario: I'd like to create a Time Off Request and Reporting application. It would have the following operation: Employees would go to a form to request a period or day as PTO Managers would be alerted to the request and either approve or deny it (which would then update the employee When the scheduled day came, the manager would confirm that the employee did or didn't take the day off Payroll would be able to run a report of the data to see who took what time off.  Managers could run the same report for their departments.  Employees could not. With a normal database application, I'd have 4 related tables: Employees, Departments, Administrators (but actually, this could be a boolean field for the employee table), and the  PTOData table.  However, I'm not sure if you can write all of these within the context of SharePoint lists.  Anyone have any ideas?  Should I just create separate tables, and only use SharePoint as a wrapper?  Let me know what you think! BTW - Dustin - I asked my manager if they'd send me to the dev training.  If I can go, this is something I'd like to cover.  For those of you who also would like to go, but are afraid of asking your boss for a few grand, I can send you my request document (the sucker was 2 1/2 pages long!) as a template. Posted May 21 2004, 08:44 PM by andrewjvelez with 3 comment(s)

• SMigrate Bug

  I think I found a bug in using SMigrate to move a site - it's only a minor one.  I'm putting it here because I'm not sure where to submit bugs to Microsoft anymore, and I'm not willing to spend an hour to figure it out. Here's the scenario: I used SMigrate to copy our production WSS site collection to some development servers.  It worked great, actually: the prod server was mis-configured to use a MSDE database rather than a Web Farm w/ SQL, but when I moved it to a server w/ that configuration, it moved the data into SQL just fine.  However, when I went to add a Web Part to the development server, it tried to connect to the old server's web part library.  I know this because it prompted me to log into the old server. I'm not sure how to fix it quite yet, but I'm going to hack into the database in the next few days to figure out where it's storing the old server's name.  If I find anything, I'll update you. Posted May 13 2004, 07:27 PM by andrewjvelez with no comments

• Starting to feel constricted...

  I'm starting to feel pretty constricted by SharePoint.  There's a lot of little things that I'd like to customize that you just can't with SharePoint right out of the box.  For instance, I've gotten requests to make attachments open in a new window when you click on them.  In fact, most of my limitations seem to come from the inherent inflexibility of the out of the box web parts.  Yes, you can change some of the attributes.  However, in order to customize the display of the data, you need to convert the views from web parts to data views.  Of course, in a data view, you can't edit the data.  It's all very frustrating...I wish you could edit the default web parts...If you know a way, please let me know. I'd like to be able to automatically create alerts for the people who actually submit an item to issue lists, rather than only send out an email only to the person the problem is assigned to. Also, there aren't any books on using only SharePoint, at least none I could find.  The documentation is pretty sparse.  It seems like the primary method for learning SharePoint remains seminars like those put on by SharePoint Experts.  They are good classes, don't get me wrong, but they are few and far between.  Not only that, but the price for a book would be around $50 - $70, while classes are around $2000 w/o room and board.  You do the math... It looks like in order to get SharePoint to do what we want it to do, we're going to have to write custom web parts and web pages.  That isn't too big of a problem, as that the SDK does in deed seem to have a lot of information in it.  I'm just ignorant of how to code specifically for SharePoint, and I have a pretty high learning curve to overcome to learn it.  Dustin, when's the next coding class?! Enough ranting for me.  If you have any ideas how to correct or work around my problems, let me know, please! ;) Posted May 12 2004, 07:58 PM by andrewjvelez with no comments