Ton Stegeman [MVP] weblog

In one of the previous articles I described how you can create a SharePoint Feature that stores values in the property bag of the site. These values were set in the site definition (onet.xml). In this article I will describe how you can easily create an administration page to edit these properties. This page will have to run in the context of the site. Serge van den Oever (we work on the same project) had some issues with that in one of his blogposts. This post will handle some of his questions, but not all. I’ll try to find to other answers later.

In the previous example we have set 2 properties from the site definition: “NavigationParent” and “NavigationExpand”.  At the end of this article our administration page will look like this:

When a user submits the page, the page will also validate if the url that was entered is a valid SharePoint site.

Step 1 Add a link to the Site Settings menu.

The first step is to create a link to the Site Settings menu. We will lock this down, so that it is only available for administrators. The easiest way to do this is by using a SharePoint Feature. How to install and activate can be found in the previous article. The feature xml for this feature looks like this:

    <Feature  Id="06d77b33-76b2-4a14-bef4-3e4b4203d88e"
              Title="Custom Navigation Site Menu items by Ton"
              Description="My custom Site Menuitems for setting up navigation."
              Version="1.0.0.0"
              Scope="Site"
              xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
        <ElementManifests>
            <ElementManifest Location="tstsitemenus.xml"/>
        </ElementManifests>
    </Feature>


 

    <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

    <CustomAction 

        Id="TSTSiteMenus.SiteSettings"

        Title="Setup Custom Navigation">
        Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.SiteSettings"
        GroupId="Customization"

        Sequence="106"

        RequireSiteAdministrator="TRUE" 

        <UrlAction Url="~site/_layouts/CustomNavigation.aspx"/>

      </CustomAction>

    </Elements>

A number of attributes further explained:

·         Title – the title of the link

·         Location – The location of the new action. This can be the Site Actions menu, edit menus, toolbars etc. I have picked “Microsoft.SharePoint.SiteSettings” to make it appear in the site settings page.

·         GroupId – The group in which the action will appear. I have picked “Customization”, because this makes our action appear in the “Look and Feel” section of the site settings. You can add these sections yourself using a “CustomActionGroup”. See the WSS SDK for more details.

·         RequireSiteAdministrator – This makes the option only appear for Site Administrators.

·         UrlAction – The url to navigate to when the user clicks the link. By using the “~site” in the url, we make our administration page run in the context of the site.

After installing and activating the feature, our site administration now has a new item:

Step 2 – Create the administration page

In the second step we will create the CustomNavigation.aspx page that is referenced from the menuoption in step 1. The first step in making your administration page look like real SharePoint administration pages, is inheriting it from “WebAdminPageBase”, which is available in the “Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages” namespace. I created a new class library project and added a new class called “CustomNavigation”.

Our aspx page should use this code behind, and also register the namespaces and controls that we will use to build the page. I will not copy all code, you can find that in the attached ZIP file.

        <%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"%>

        <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="Eog.OfficeServer.ApplicationPages.CustomNavigation, Eog.OfficeServer.ApplicationPages, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4765c72bbf274873" MasterPageFile="~/_layouts/application.master" %>

Step 3 – Add controls to the placeholders

Because our page inherits from WebAdminPageBase, we now have several placeholders that we need to populate. We don’t need to build the whole page, the masterpage does that for us, we just populate a few placeholder. The first placeholders are the title placeholders:

        <asp:Content

            ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderPageTitle"

            runat="server">

            <SharePoint:EncodedLiteral

                runat="server"

                text="Custom Navigation"

                EncodeMethod='HtmlEncode'/>

        </asp:Content>

        <asp:Content

            ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea"

            runat="server">

        Setup Custom Navigation

        </asp:Content>

The main content are of the page (called PlaceHolderMain) will re-use some standard control templates that are available in the ControlTemplates folder.

These are registered at the top of the page as well:

        <%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="InputFormSection" src="~/_controltemplates/InputFormSection.ascx" %>

We start off creating a new section on the page for our “Local Navigation” settings. This can be done by using the InputFormSection control. The InputFormSection can have one or multiple controls. These are added within a “<Template_InputFormControls>“.

This template can have multiple controls. These controls are InputFormControl controls, that are a combination of the label and the control. They look like this:

        <wssuc:InputFormControl

            LabelText="Navigation Expand Depth"

            LabelAssociatedControlID="navigationExpandTextBox"

            runat="server">

            <Template_Control>

                <wssawc:InputFormTextBox

                    Title="Navigation Expand Depth"

                    class="ms-input"

                    ID="navigationExpandTextBox"

                    Runat="server"

                    MaxLength="255" />

            </Template_Control>

        </wssuc:InputFormControl>

Step 4 – Add OK and Cancel button

After adding the control to edit the values, we add the OK and Cancel button to the page. These are added in a special ButtonSection, that will be added just below the InputFormSection. The code for the OK button (see the zip for the rest):

        <Template_Buttons>

            <asp:Button

                UseSubmitBehavior="false"

                runat="server"

                class="ms-ButtonHeightWidth"

                OnClick="HandleOKButtonClick"

                Text="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_okbutton_text%>"

                id="buttonOK"

                accesskey="<%$Resources:wss,okbutton_accesskey%>"/>

        </Template_Buttons>

Step 5 – Add validation

The last part of the aspx page at this stage is the validation of the page. Most out of the box administration pages add a FormDigest control to the page. This is a SharePoint control that adds security validation to the page. This is specific for the user requesting the page and the time it is requested. After some time it expires, making it impossible to post the page. I have not added this yet to my page, will write a post on it after I sorted this out.

The validation that we will add is a validator for checking if the url entered in the Navigation Parent field is a valid SharePoint site. Just after the InputFormTextbox, we add a CustomValidator:

        <asp:CustomValidator

            ID="validateParent"

            ControlToValidate="navigationParentTextBox"

            Display = "Dynamic"

            ErrorMessage = "Please enter a url for a SharePoint site."

            OnServerValidate="ValidateNavigationParent"

            runat="server"/>

Step 6 – Implement code-behind

The code to actually make the page work is implemented in the CustomNavigation.cs. First we need to ensure that users who are not administrator cannot access the page by using the url directly. That is easy J; just add these lines :

        protected override bool RequireSiteAdministrator

        {

            get

            {

                return true;

            }

        }

You can find all code to load and save the siteproperties in the attached zip file. Saving a property to the property bag can be done like this:

        // Store NavigationExpand in the property bag.

        if (web.Properties.ContainsKey("navigationexpand"))

        {

            if (web.Properties["navigationexpand"].ToLower() != navigationExpandTextBox.Text.ToLower())

            {

                web.Properties["navigationexpand"] = navigationExpandTextBox.Text;

                modified = true;

            }

        }

        else

        {

            web.Properties.Add("navigationexpand", navigationExpandTextBox.Text);

            modified = true;

        }

And don’t forget to call Update:

        web.Properties.Update();

After saving the properties to the property bag, we will redirect the user back to the site settings page. The code to do that:

        SPUtility.Redirect(

            "settings.aspx",

            SPRedirectFlags.UseSource |

            SPRedirectFlags.RelativeToLayoutsPage,

            this.Context);

            }

        }

Step 7 – Deploy the administration page

The proper way to deploy our administration page in SharePoint 2007 is through a Solution Deployment package. I haven’t had the time to sort that out, but is a very nice way of deploying packages like this. Hope to find some time to sort this out for a next blogpost. You can find more information on the WSS FAQ site of Mike Walsh.

I have just added the assembly to the GAC and copied the aspx file to the LAYOUTS folder manually (by default “C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12TEMPLATELAYOUTS”).