Well I took the exam.. And found that the study work I put in has paid off.. oh and probably the last 9 months playing with the Beta and the RTM versions..
890 points I got, with a pass mark of 700, so I was happy. I think my knowledge of Kerberos and Multi/Unicasting is what let me down and stopped me getting the full 1000!
Well that’s cos I locked myself away for a few days to study for 70-631 – Windows Sharepoint Services – Configuring and Administering..
I’m due to take it in 1.5 hours and I don’t feel at all confident.. grin
Well that was an interesting few hours this afternoon following Nick’s article on creating workflow within Visual Studio 2005 for SharePoint. I got as far as creating all the InfoPath structures, and then when I went to edit the workflow.cs in Workflow Designer, I was faced with a Class Script and Nick had a pretty picture?.. hmm what went wrong..
Well the key difference is that Nick is developing his workflows on a Virtual machine that has Visual Studio and SharePoint installed.. I don’t.. even though I have the .Net 3.0 foundation and everything else loaded, I don’t have some of the key DLL’s that are needed..
How does this manifest itself I hear you say.. Well it’s not that obvious whats wrong, other than the fact that you don’t get the pretty workflow designer window and the relevant tools. There is however 3 Warnings in the error window stating that “The referenced component ‘Microsoft.SharePoint’ could not be found” , this is also joined by entries for Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions and Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Tasks.
The resolution for this is to copy the relevant files from a server with these assemblies already installed and then registering them in your global assembly cache (GAC).
Firstly, if you don’t have this created, create the following directory on the machine with Visual Studio 2005 loaded on it..
c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI
Now, from the same location in the SharePoint servers 12 Hive, copy the following files into that location:-
This resolves the issue with the references and permits the project to open properly without errors, but now, if you double click on the workflow.cs entry you get the following error:-
Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions.intl, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
To the same location as before, now copy the following 2 files from the SharePoint server:-
c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions.intl\12.0.0
.0__71e9bce111e9429c\microsoft.sharepoint.WorkflowActions.intl.dll
c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions.intl.resour
ces\12.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\microsoft.SharePoint.workflowactions.intl.reso
urces.dll
(You’ll have to cut and paste the above into notepad and remove the carriage returns as they wouldn’t paste into the blog properly for some reason..)
Now the last part.. Open an explorer window on your development to the folder you just created, and open a second to c:\windows\assembly
Now drag all 6 files from the ISAPI folder and drop them onto the C:\windows\assembly folder to register them with the GAC. (Note, the files won’t copy, it’ll just create the references you need..)
Now run VS2005 once more and start workflowing to your hearts content..
Many thanks to Gudjon who was the key source for that fix..
I’ve decided to mvoe on from getting the info out of Excel using custom properties. It’s possible that I may be able to use infopath forms instead with workflows to do this, so to this end, I’m following a couple of blog posts written by Nick Swan (He who runs the SUGUK) on developing and deploying Infopath based workflow systems on MOSS 2007.
The first one discusses the tasks required to write a custom workflow in Visual Studio 2005 and the second deals with deploying this to your SharePoint farm.
Developing a SharePoint workflow with InfoPath forms.
And the second..
Deploying the workflow task to SharePoint 2007.
I’ll let you know how I got on following Nick’s guide.
What a busy few weeks this has been. Unfortunatley, not much of it has been spent on SharePoint as I’ve had some server deliveries to meet.
I’m back on SharePoint this week now. Still trying to sort out how to get dates out of the Excel spreadsheets and then displaying this and other data in a monthly roll up..
As ever watch this space for further updates!
One of the problems that I’ve hit recently is how to pass customer properties from an Excel spreadsheet so that they become column entries in a document library.
Now SharePoint allows you to pass text values quite happily as linked content, however it doesn’t like passing numbers or dates.
Well, I’ve found a way round the numbers problem. It’s a little convoluted, but it does work.
First off, set the column names that you want in the Document library. Make sure you format these as you want them. In my case, I have a column named ES Setup and it’s set to have a 2 decimal point accuracy.
Now upload the excel spreadsheet into the doc library. Don’t bother filling in the properties at this point, just save it. Now re-open the excel spreadsheet. if you check file/properties then click on the button marked “File Properties” you should see your nice column name sitting there waiting for content.
I have on my spreadsheet a named cell called ES_Setup. This contains a set-up cost to clients that I want to bring out into the library. Next to this, I have created a hidden cell called txt_ES_setup. This cell contains the formulae =TEXT(ES_Setup,”0.00″) which basically puts a text copy of the numerical data into the cell.
Now the final part is to link the content of txt_ES_Setup to the column in SharePoint. To do this, go back to the File Properties window. Click on the SharePoint column name and click on Link to Content, Value will then become a drop down list and you can select txt_ES_setup. Click on Modify and you should see the correct value appear down in the properties box along with the linked properties symbol next to the name.
I’ve tried the same method with dates, but at the moment, as soon as you link any form of data into a propertie that forms a data column, you get a script error.
As ever, Watch this space..
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