Michael Ciba

I have in some capacity always shared what I have learnt while doing projects with my fellow developers. Until now though that sharing was limited to well the people on that project, people on the next project or the odd person who read my company blog at http://consultingblogs.emc.com/michaelciba/ . In order to reach a bit wider audience though and share my half baked ideas with the world I have decided to poke my head above the parapet and start a new blog. After all it seems all the rage these days! So what can you expect from me? Well all sorts I guess my interests are varied but mostly I just want to share things which I think are cool and which I hope will help some fellow developers along the way. Now all I need to do is start thinking of a second blog post idea....

While working on a client site recently I was asked to hide the site actions menu and only allow certain users to view it. After a bit of digging around and searching I found the answer to be the “SPSecurityTrimmedControl” . Now the great thing about this control is that it only renders the contents of the controls it contains if the user has a matching permission level. Therefore the only thing I needed to do was create myself a custom permission level called “DisplaySiteActionsMenu” and assign that to the group or groups who should see the site actions menu. Once this was done all the standard users to the site didn't even know the site actions menu existed. Below is an example of how I updated the master page for the site to make this work. < SharePoint : SPSecurityTrimmedControl ID ="stcHideMasterPageItems" PermissionsString ="DisplaySiteActionsMenu"> < PublishingSiteAction : SiteActionMenu runat ="server"/> </ Shar...

Well it’s been a while since I have done a blog entry so I thought I would ease myself back into them with a small post about how to debug a hidden feature. As everyone knows in SharePoint you have the ability to make a feature hidden which means it doesn’t show up via the UI. This is useful if you don’t want users deactivating or activating a feature in the wrong site etc and making a mess of things. However, to debug these features I until quite recently use to switch the “hidden” attribute back to “false” so I could activate the feature via the UI and attached the debugger to the “w3wp” to see what gremlins were making my code go up in a cloud of smoke. However I learnt the other day about the “Debugger.Launch();” method which enables you to launch a debugger for your code and attach to the relevant process to enabling debugging (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.debugger.launch.aspx ). Now all I need to do when I want to debug my hidden featu...

So it’s been a fun packed morning looking at an issue within ie6 that was causing the “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items” prompt to be displayed then viewing a page over HTTPS. The problem itself only reared its ugly head when the page tried to open a UI dialog to the user using the “ThickBox” add-on to jquery. So after a bit of digging around I found out that IE6 shows this message because “ThickBox” is adding an iframe to the page without the src attribute set. In order to fix the issue then all you need to do is add a dummy src attribute to the iframe when it is appended to the page by “ThickBox”. See the example below.  The bit of code you need to update can be found on line 38 within the thickbox.js file. Original Code   $("body").append("<iframe id='TB_HideSelect'></iframe><div id='TB_overlay'></div><div id='TB_window'></div>"); Updated Code $("...

  So I have been meaning to write a blog entry for some time now and at last I have finally manage to drag together a few coherent sentences and get the ball rolling. So what topic have I picked to start my blogging experience with at Conchango? Well Sharepoint of course! Anyway down to business and the reason for the post is that the other day I had to deal with an issue surrounding a timeout when activating a feature via the "ManageFeatures.aspx" page within the Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) user interface. The feature itself was somewhat of a beast and did a lot of work within the "FeatureActivated" method behind the screens setting up lists, creating content etc which meant it was going to take a long time to complete.  So a timeout issue? Well as it turns out yes. The problem is that activating a feature via the "ManageFeatures.aspx" page means that the request to activate the feature is handled by asp.net and as such i...