How to work with dates using XSL stylesheet

Calculating the difference between two dates and then do a decision based on the outcome can sometimes be tricky with XSL, because one only have the dates as numbers more or less. You don't have an Object of DateTime like you have with C# etc.

One requirement I often met is to format fields based on if a task is overdue or not, with some more logic like yellow lights to if its close to the due date. The easiest way to do this is often attaching a xsl:stylesheet to the list view. The tricky part is getting the days, months, years right. You have to compare the due date of the task up against the values for today, this is easy when they are in the same month when you can take the difference on days. The problems starts when they are in different months, and especially with months like February with leap years.

What I always do is that I first create all the variables for day, month and year for both the due date and today's date.

<xsl:variable name="MonthCurrent" select="number(substring-before(ddwrt:FormatDate(ddwrt:Today(),1033,1),'/'))"/>
<xsl:variable name="DayCurrent" select="number(substring-before(substring-after(ddwrt:FormatDate(ddwrt:Today(),1033,1),'/'),'/'))" />
<xsl:variable name="YearCurrent" select="number(substring-after(substring-after(ddwrt:FormatDate(ddwrt:Today(),1033,1),'/'),'/'))" />
<xsl:variable name="DueDay"  select="number(substring-before($thisNode/@DueDate,'.'))"/>
<xsl:variable name="DueMonth" select="number(substring-before(substring-after($thisNode/@DueDate,'.'),'.'))" />
<xsl:variable name="DueYear" select="number(substring-after(substring-after($thisNode/@DueDate,'.'),'.'))" />

Note that I have in this situation dates separated with ".", like 22.11.1983. But my system dates uses a "/", and returns the date as 11/22/1983.


Next part is to find how many days it is in the month:

Doing it this way it even checks for leap years.

Finally we can find number of days til due date. This is a simplified approach, because in most cases one don't need that many days before the due date. In this scenario its set to max 20 days.

This is the variable you can use later in a stylesheet to check the number of days a task or similar are overdue or not. 

Provision Calculated Fields with Formula

This will be a short note.

I had an issue as always when I try to make something  in Visual Studio. Today it was the first time I had to create calculated field using less than and greater than. And I'm not the most experienced one when it comes to setting up the XML, and it went bad.

I was stuck on how to get the "<" and ">" symbols in.

I could not find any information about it, then I started to think about HTML and entity names. And of course that was the solution, &lt; and &gt;

<Formula>=IF([RisikoRisikofaktor]&lt;0,"Green",IF([RisikoRisikofaktor]&gt;14,"Red","Amber"))</Formula>

Add Lync Presence to SharePoint List column with XSL Stylesheet

One might wonder why one needs this when you have the People field with this ability already. The reasons could be many, but one of them are to get presence and easy access to people not directly associated with your site and Active Directory. And often you have these people added to your Lync contact list. Many companies run their Lync with open federation, meaning they can freely communicate with other IM networks.

In a project site there is most likely a contact list, this lists does not only include people involved with the site, it could be suppliers, clients not involved on the project site etc.

There is many ways to this, but I'll take the Out of the box approach, starting simply by adding the Contact list that ships with SharePoint.

Next I add a column to the list, just a Single line of text, this could be named anything you like, but in this example I named it Lync.


Now drop the Contact list in a web zone (or you could edit it in the views). When you go into Edit Web Part and open Miscellaneous you see there is an option to add a XSL Link:

What we need to do now is create a XSL file with a style sheet, this style will add presence based on the Email field in the Contact list. I could have made another field for the SIP address, I'm just lazy since I have never seen anyone used something else than the email for SIP. You could just create a new column in the list called SIP, and use that instead of the Email field. I also use the Title(LastName) and FirstName fields for this.
PS: Make sure those three fields, and the Lync field is marked as visible in the view used by the Web Part.


Now open your favourite text editor, I like to use Notepad++ for work like this.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="xsl msxsl ddwrt" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">
 <xsl:include href="/_layouts/xsl/main.xsl"/>
 <xsl:include href="/_layouts/xsl/internal.xsl"/> 
 <xsl:template name="FieldRef_Text_body.Lync" match="FieldRef[@Name='Lync']" mode="Text_body">
  <xsl:param name="thisNode" select="."/>
  <xsl:variable name="etternavn">
   <xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@Title" />
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="fornavn">
   <xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@FirstName" />
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="fulltNavn">
   <xsl:value-of select="concat($fornavn,' ',$etternavn)" />
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="itemID">
   <xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@ID" />
  </xsl:variable>

  <xsl:variable name="sipAfter">
   <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($thisNode/@Email,':')" />
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="sip">
   <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($sipAfter,'&#34;')" />
  </xsl:variable>

   <div id="PresenceLink_{$itemID}"><span class="ms-imnSpan"><img border='0' height='12' src='/_layouts/images/imnhdr.gif' onload="IMNRC('{$sip}')" ShowOfflinePawn='1' style='padding-right: 3px;' id="PresencePawn_{$itemID}" alt='pawn' /> <a href='' id="ProfileLink_{$itemID}"><xsl:value-of select="$fulltNavn" /></a></span></div>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This XSL overrides the default template, and adds a div tag with html in the column Lync instead. First I create a set of variables, they are in Norwegian; etternavn(last name), fornavn(first name), fulltNavn(Full Name), itemID, sipAfter and sip.

The three first variables explains them self, but the reason I use substring-before and subring-after on the Email is because SharePoint(or an IE plugin, haven't checked that) creates a link from emails, with <a href=mailto:> etc. First I take everything after the char ":" and then substrings everything before the '&#34',  '&#34' is the equivalent to double quote(").

That's all the variables needed to build the presence. If you view the source of any SharePoint site with presence you'll see the same HTML code. I haven't added ProfileLink etc (well its just a href, could be to anything), I just left it in there to show, but it's possible to add a link to lets say the UserProfile, but since these are for non-members of SharePoint its no point. Note: They need unique IDs, that's why I use the  itemID variable.   


Then its time to save the file and upload it to SharePoint, I just dropped it in the Style Library.

Open the Web Part again and add the link to the file you uploaded.

The result:

SharePoint Updates

Do not install SharePoint updates just for doing it.

In these days with a lot of devices running on software, people have grown a habit to clicking the update button on a monthly basis, everything from the PC/Smartphone to the TV. And I know from my own experience how easy it is to just install an update on a device without even thinking over what the update actually does. Because you expect it will do something good and magically make it better somehow.

In an enterprise environment this is not always true, there are so many different elements playing together. And sometimes the smallest change can break the servers. 

That’s why you should ask yourself some questions before installing updates:

• Is there something wrong with my current Farm?
• Does the update fix critical errors concerning services and features you use?
• Do you need the new Features added?

If the answer to these questions are no, you probably shouldn’t install them at all. Why risk breaking a perfectly healthy SharePoint farm.

If you do need the updates, you should always test the update in a staging/testing environment that is close to a clone of your production environment before rolling it out on the production servers.  It’s easy to blame Microsoft for releasing updates that could break a farm, but they simple can’t test it for everything, there is so many different configurations, 3^rd party code and integrations on the various farms out there.  

If you read the e-mail sent from Microsoft when requesting updates you'll notice they do mention this.

All I'm saying is that you should be careful with updates, they could potentially do more harm than good to your farm.

SharePoint Search Center Basics

This post will touch the basics of setting up an Enterprise Search Center.

Setup SharePoint Search Service


1. Central Administration -> Manage Service Applications

2. Select Search Service Application and click Manage in the Ribbon.
(If its not there, create it from New in the Ribbon)

From here there are tons of different aspects of search that can be configured, but for now I'll focus on the pure basics. And that's crawl, without crawling there isn't much to search on.

Start with setting up a daily crawl, on the Quick Launch on the right there is a link to Content Sources. By default your local SharePoint sites are added. From Crawl Setting click Create Schedules, create a daily schedule for Full Crawl.

This can be done for incremental too, but should have a much higher frequency, maybe every 15 mins or so.

 You can start a Full Crawl right from the content sources by click on their drop down menu.

Adding a New Content Source


Lets say you have a file share with tons of documents, obviously that's what SharePoint is their for replace, but many still have it. Then you can add a File Share as a content source so its available from SharePoint Search.

Configure it:

Make sure that the user used to search have access to the file share, only read access needed.

Check Logs

Crawling generates logs that you can read to make sure their aren't any error etc. You can find the logs from the Quick Launch under Crawl Log.

Note: A common error when crawling SharePoint Sites when you have specified an URL in the search Start Addresses.

Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled.

A fix for that error is found at Sensoft2000 blog.

Create the Search Center


Now the pure basics is up, but its enough to use the Search Center. You have probably noticed their is an Search feature already on SharePoint sites, but they only search within the Site Collection. Even if you only have one Site Collection on your intranet it will still exclude My Site where search on people are done.

Create a new Site Collection from Central Administration:

This Site Collection could be used on its own and you can connect your other Site Collections to use this Search Center when you use the search included on all pages.

Configure Site Collections to use the Search Center:

Here is an example of how it will look after you have connected it.