richard-slater.co.uk » Sharepoint

Strange SPQuery Behaviour

Richard Slater — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:31:43 +0000

I have been working on a very simple web part for a long time, the actual code for the web part takes less than an hour to write and merely displays a colour coded letter based on a query from a SharePoint list taking the date as a parameter.

It has taken a long time because of some strange behaviour with the SPQuery object, initially there was a problem with every row in the table being returned irrespective of the query, the odd thing was that if you ran the query in U2U CAML Query Builder it worked and the SPListItemCollection.count method would return 1 suggesting the query was working.

After adding a copious number of debugging command, I built up a pattern of what was happening and why. However no matter what I changed it either threw an exception as expected or returned all of the rows. I started commenting out lines of code one at a time trying to find the culprit, eventually moving on to commenting out the Debug.WriteLine statements, until I hit this line:

86	Debug.WriteLine(fetchCurrentWeek.ViewXml);

After commenting out this line the whole thing worked perfectly, I can put the date forward on the server and it will update I can change the source table and it reflects the changes after the cache has been cleared. I have looked over the Microsoft Documentation on SPQuery.ViewXml and can’t find any reference to it actually affecting the functionality of the object.

I have included my code at the end of this post for anyone to see, feel free to experiment with it. If you figure it out please do let me know.

using (SPWeb site = SPControl.GetContextSite(Context).OpenWeb())
{
 SPList weekList = site.GetList(this.SourceList);
 // sharepoint requires that we use a ISO8601 DateTime string,
 // generate it and insert it into the query
 string mondayOfCurrentWeek = SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(GetMondayOfCurrentWeek().Date);
 StringBuilder camlBuilder = new StringBuilder();
 camlBuilder.AppendLine  ("");
 camlBuilder.AppendLine  ("  ");
 camlBuilder.AppendLine  ("    ");
 camlBuilder.AppendFormat("    {0}\r\n", mondayOfCurrentWeek);
 camlBuilder.AppendLine  ("  ");
 camlBuilder.AppendLine  ("");
 
 string getWeekCAML = camlBuilder.ToString();
 SPQuery fetchCurrentWeek = new SPQuery(weekList.DefaultView);
 // fetch all of the matching weeks from the table
 fetchCurrentWeek.Query = getWeekCAML;
 SPListItemCollection matchingWeeks = weekList.GetItems(fetchCurrentWeek); // the results of the query should only ever equal 1 if it dosn't something is wrong
 if (matchingWeeks.Count == 1)
 {
  SPListItem week = (SPListItem)matchingWeeks[0];
  WeekType = week["Week Type"].ToString();
  WeekType = SPEncode.HtmlEncode(WeekType); // HtmlEncode the result to make sure it dosn't contain any nastys
  String WeekNumber = week["Week Number"].ToString();
  WeekNumber = SPEncode.HtmlEncode(WeekNumber);
  Debug.WriteLine(String.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "[WeekWidget] Found record for {0} as Week {1} - Number {2}", mondayOfCurrentWeek, WeekType, WeekNumber));
  // cache the WeekType for 7 days from midnight on Monday as this is when the changeover between weeks happenswou
  Context.Cache.Insert(CACHE_WEEKTYPE, WeekType, null, GetMondayOfCurrentWeek().AddDays(7), TimeSpan.Zero);
 } // end if matchingWeeks count equal to 1
 else
 {
  // more than one week matched, we can not determine the output correctly
  ErrorText.Text = "More than one week matched in the table, please check the table.";
  LogEvent("More than one week (" + matchingWeeks.Count.ToString() + ") matched in the table, please check the table.");
 } // end else

Happy Hunting

Adding VSeWSS 1.3 Solutions to Source Control

Richard Slater — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:35:12 +0000

Having done a little experimenting with Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS), I wanted to start actually developing features for our intranet site. I try and add everything that is even slightly important into source control (Subversion). VSeWSS creates normal looking solutions, however when you deploy your project to a SharePoint site it created an additional directory alongside “bin” and “obj” called “pkg”.

This “pkg” folder contains the manifest.xml, soloution.xml and feature.xml files that are used to create the feature to be deployed into SharePoint. Initially I was including this folder in my commits however, I noticed that any tweaks made to feature.xml were overwritten when you deployed the package again. After some searching around I came across an article that suggests deleting the “pkg” folder under certain circumstances. From this I assume that the contents of the “pkg” folder is generated each and every time you package and deploy your solution (or indeed project), thus it does not need to be added to source control.

While writing this post I did come across another blog that suggests adding the “pkg” folder to source control. There does appear to be little advice out there regarding VSeWSS and Source Control. I would be interested to hear others experiences on the subject.

Isolator For SharePoint

Richard Slater — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:47:15 +0000

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.