Under the Hood: Insight from the Ironworks Technology Group

How to display source site title in Content Query Web Part and Search Results?

What?

How to display source site title in Content Query Web Part and Search Results?

Why?

It is a not so uncommon requirement to group documents / list items by sites and display the site title for each group.

Content Query Web Part returns lot of data but site title is not returned by it by default.

SharePoint search service application does not come with property for site name or site title by default but luckily sharepoint search crawls and indexes site name as ows_sitename

Dealing with SharePoint 2010 calendar's "Add" button issues after fixing the scrolling bug

What?

How to fix SharePoint 2010 calendar's "Add" button issues after fixing the scrolling bug

Why?

Every SharePoint designer must have bumped across the scrolling issue with SharePoint 2010 master pages.

Kyle Schaeffer & Greg Galipeau have already written excellent post 1 & excellent post 2 about this issue and how to fix it and so I am not going into details of the issue and how to fix it.

Of course, with any solution that changes the core way a system works, there is bound to be issues. One such issue is with the OOB calendar web part's "Add" button.

Incomplete SharePoint 2010 SPWebPartManager and its events that are never raised

What?

Incomplete SharePoint 2010 SPWebPartManager and its events that are never raised

 Why?

The SPWebPartManager in SharePoint 2010 is incomplete. Some of its events are never raised and even if they are raised they don't work as expected.

Recently I was working on a scenario where I had to restrict users from being able to add certain web parts to certain web part zones in the page.
There is no such property in the web part zone that we can use to achieve this kind of functionality.
However there are other useful properties that a web part zone offers such as the below:

SharePoint 2010: User Profiles configured correctly but people search not working

What?

Is the user profiles service application configured correctly but people search not working?

As you can see in the below screenshot, the user profile service is able to synchronize properly with AD and pull user profiles.

 

When I searched for a user from a SharePoint site using people search results web part, no profiles were returned. I have also tried the query service web service (/_vti_bin/search.asmx) with no luck.

SharePoint 2010 - How to Backup/Restore Managed Metadata from one farm/environment to another?

 

What?

SharePoint 2010 - How to Backup/Restore Managed Metadata from one farm/environment to another?

 

Why?

You will be amazed by the lack of proper import/export functionality.

It is quite a general requirement to migrate Managed Metadata Service / Termsets from one environment to the other.

 

10 Features That Will Make Your SharePoint Search Shine - Ironworks Insight on CMSWire

Search giants like Google and Bing provide powerful features that allow you to do great things with search. But, do you know about the possibilities available with SharePoint search? We’ve pulled together 10 ways to help you make your SharePoint search shine. You might be surprised at all of the exciting new features available with SharePoint search.

Our SharePoint Architect, Chaitu Madala, shares his insight on SharePoint's top features.

Read the full article on CMSWire.com! 10 Features That Will Make Your SharePoint Search Shine

A shortcut to debug SharePoint 2010 Solutions

What?

All of us who worked on developing SharePoint 2010 solutions are aware of the inconvenience involved with debugging them.

Slides from SharePoint Saturday: The Conference DC on 12th August 2011

Here are the slides from Slides from my SharePoint session given on August 12 2011 at SharePoint Saturday The Conference in Washington DC titled "Leverage Search and Customize to your Brand within SharePoint 2010" as promised.

SharePoint : System.InvalidOperationException: The farm is unavailable.

Scenario:

You receive the below exception when you try to access Central Admin / any SharePoint site.

SharePoint 2010 - Search Error - "The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component"

The Problem:

We recently ran across an issue that prevented the SharePoint Server 2010 from starting with the below exception:

"The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component"