How to change theme when new site is created

Some of you have this requirement to create a new theme for your customer. And obviously this theme will be used automatically if a new site is created.

One of the stupid way is to include the step to change the theme as part of the operating mannual, but let me show you the tricks.

If you understand the concept of branding on how to change the .master page, you will find this theme changer feature is very similar.

What you need to do is to :
1. Create a new theme (i.e. NewTheme) and put it in 12hive\ Themese folder
2. Create a new .vb file which inherit SPFeatureReceiver and override FeatureActivated method to include the below coding.

Dim objWeb As SPWeb
objWeb = properties.Feature.Parent
objWeb.ApplyTheme ( " NewTheme " )
objWeb.Update()

3. The above is to ensure that newtheme is being switched when the code is feature is activated.
4. Compile it with strong name and deploy to GAC.
5. Package this .dll as feature
6. Locate the onet.xml for site template that you have 12hive\template\sitetemplates\SITE NAME\xml
7. locate to include the feature ID which you have created earlier.

The idea of this theme changer is very similar to branding.

SharePoint RSS

SharePoint RSS provides the flexibility to expose view as RSS feed. With this feature, we can perform filtering, grouping and etc. to aggregate the list data information in the list and expose it as RSS feed.

Follow this article to achieve it.

Survey on Publishing template for anonymous

You might experience access denied behaviour when you try to use anonymous access to response survey.

How this happen is because a feature called ViewFormPagesLockDown is activated for publishing site.

So the key is to deactivate this.

stsadm -o deactivatefeature -name ViewFormPagesLockDown -url yrURL

find out more from here

Good Architect for DAL

I came across a very structure way to populate data from database back to object class.

After we retrieve data from database, typically we will have a datareader object. We can leverage on the method below to convert dr value to match with the data type in object class.

protected T GetDataObjectValue(IDataReader dr, string columnName)
{
int i = dr.GetOrdinal(columnName);
if (!dr.IsDBNull(i))
return (T)dr.GetValue(i);
else
return default(T);
}

Next, we can build a function to load the value into object class like below:

obj.ID = base.GetDataValue(dr, "ID");

If required, we can add the object into a object List.

Infopath Best Practice

Infopath Deployment Best Practice

infopath limitation

It is very important to understand the limitation of infopath 2007. From high level, web based infopath is very powerful but it comes with several limitations.

1. No native write to SQL databases. The ease of use of establing an ADO connection to SQL or Access, and being able to query and write back to a database is lost. Instead you will probably need to talk to the DB via a web service.
   
2. No roundtripping for cascading picklists. Something I do all the time is have one picklist be a filter for another picklist. Common example, pick a state, which then filters the city field dropdown. Can't do that in a web form.
3. Summary list of controls that aren't supported in web forms:
   ComboBox,Multiple-Selection List Box
   Master/Detail,Bulleted, Numbered and Plain List
   Picture ,Ink Picture ,Vertical Label
   Scrolling and Horizontal Region ,Horizontal Repeating Table
   Choice Group ,Repeating Choice Group
   Choice Section ,Repeating Recursive Section
   ActiveX Controls

Refer to this article for more details, MSDN article.

With this limitation, this shows you how to perform debugging.

Email Regular expression validation

Email regular expression validation

([\w\-\.]+)@((\[([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}\])(([\w\-]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4}))