Branching Surveys Do Not Support Workflows/Alerts

Contrary to popular belief, SharePoint does not support workflows/alerts for ALL lists. A survey with branching is one of those exceptions. An out of the box workflow fails to initialize at all. A workflow built in Designer will initialize and show a status of running, but the tasks will never get executed. I was able to get a workflow built in Designer to run on a survey with no branches however.

If you require branching functionality (like my customer), you've got a couple options. One, build the form in InfoPath which can achieve the branching functionality of the survey. If end users do not have InfoPath installed on their machines and SharePoint is not MOSS (with InfoPath services), the remaining option is to create a custom event handler attached to the survey that will perform the workflow tasks.

Posted on 8/2/2010 9:46:00 AM by sterlingt

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Categories: MOSS 2007 | SharePoint 2007 | WSS 3.0

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MyDocuments directory missing from SharePoint on Windows 7

It's fairly common practice for organizations to map its users' MyDocuments directory to a network (fileshare) location to facilitate back-up. The company laptop I received was no exception, but when I tried to download a document from SharePoint - the was no trace of MyDocuments anywhere on my machine from the file navigation dialog within SharePoint. Similarly, if I selected the 'Open in Explorer' command from the Actions dropdown - no MyDocuments. As it turns out, the network drive that MyDocuments points to is not index-able and consequently SharePoint does not acknowledge it.
When I deleted the network drive as a location and tried to add it back in, I got the following error:

This network location can’t be included because it is not indexed.

The network location also indicates a status of 'Unsupported' within the Documents Library Locations. Moreover, I can't seem to recover my original 'MyDocuments' location and instead had to create a new folder under my Users profile directory and set that as my default save location. SharePoint has no problem recognizing the new location (since it's index-able).
Here's a smattering of troubleshooting techniques I encountered for reference.



Posted on 7/13/2010 10:44:00 AM by sterlingt

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Categories: MOSS 2007 | SharePoint 2007 | WSS 3.0 | Windows 7

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"June 'Black Tuesday' patch causes SharePoint woes"

Posted on 6/17/2010 12:11:00 PM by sterlingt

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Today's - Um....wuh?!


Trying to use the SharePoint List web service (List.asmx) AddAttachment method (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/lists.lists.addattachment%28office.12%29.aspx) to add an attachment to a document library item? And seeing a cryptic 'Value does not fall within the expected range' exception? Well, APPARENTLY - this method doesn't work on document libraries (or form libraries): http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointdevelopment/thread/68db70bc-94b1-4dfb-b33e-e42341807583.

Um...wuh?! Yea. I got around it by using the Copy web service's (Copy.asmx) CopyIntoItems method (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/987581/how-do-you-use-the-copyintoitems-method-of-the-sharepoint-copy-web-service). Fortunately I'm creating a new attachment list item, rather than adding an attachment to an existing list item - not sure how to achieve that remotely.

'Scuse me while I go practice my speech to clients on why they should upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and its lovely Client Object Model.

Posted on 6/17/2010 8:22:00 AM by sterlingt

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InfoPath Forms Services Error: schema validation found non-data type

So I got my first taste of working with the new SharePoint 2010 Managed Client Object Model...and just one exaggerated word: Saw-weeeeeet. I used it to write a module that would programmatically add an attachment to an InfoPath 2007 document stored in SharePoint. Ironically enough, the COM code worked right out of the gate and it was the XML DOM manipulation code that proved the most finicky. It's alot of code so I'm not going to post it all up, but if you have a need to programmatically manipulate InfoPath (XML) documents stored within SharePoint - shoot me an email and I'll send you a code sample.

That said, I thought I'd post a quick blurb about one of the obscure gotchas I encountered on this project. I was seeing the following error when trying to open the InfoPath document in InfoPath Forms Services after making the programmatic changes:

schema validation found non-data type

Initial searching turned up a bunch of articles referring to the xsi:nil attribute, but that was not my issue. In fact, I used a text editor to compare the 2 files (an XML document created in InfoPath Forms Services and an XML document modified by my programmatic code) - disregarding case and spacing, and they were identical! However I realized that a couple of the tags in the programmatically saved document had a line feed inserted between their opening tag and closing tag, and more importantly - removing the line feeds fixed the problem! (The fact that trivial white-space was capable of invalidating InfoPath's schema is a testimony to its instability in my opinion, but whatever - job security, right?)

Many hours and dead ends later, I eventually stumbled onto this posting http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/xmlandnetfx/thread/0be81446-3be6-458a-a2e7-7a86e05ee85d, instructing me to set the XMLDocument's "PreserveWhitespace" property to true in order to prevent it from imposing its own space-formatting on the XML content output.
That fixed it...and I blogged it ;-)

Posted on 5/28/2010 5:06:00 AM by sterlingt

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Categories: MOSS 2007 | SharePoint 2007 | SharePoint 2007 Features

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