Here are some useful SharePoint links. These will be very useful if you are choosing a proper solution for your customer. Here you will find more about SharePoint editions and how much your solution might cost. Microsoft Office
In Part 1 of this post I discussed the possible options to obtain a document URL for a document in the document library. With this post I will explain how you can achieve this with a simple workflow.
In your document library create a column “Encoded URL” (Single line of text). It will be used to store URL later on. In your document library versioning settings you must set option to require checking out items. This is very important step. The workflow we are going to create will be fired every time document is modified. Since workflow will modify item, if we do not require checking out, workflow might end up in an infinite loop. Without checking out workflow might result in very confusing errors informing you that someone else modified your document that it cannot be saved and similar.
To create a workflow you will need program called Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer (FrontPage successor). Here is what you need to do:
1. Open your SharePoint site with SharePoint designer
2. Choose New > Workflow
3. For workflow start options choose:
a. Automatically start this workflow when a new item is created
b. Automatically start this workflow whenever an item is changed
4. Create only a single step for your workflow and
a. For step condition choose “Compare Documents field” and set it as on figure below
b. Add tree actions (as shown below)
i. Check out item
ii. Set value for encoded URL column
iii. Check in item
5. Save your workflow
When completed your document library will look like this one (document URL is shown in Encoded URL column):
One of my readers (Joel) sent me an email with the following question:
I am trying to do something that I think should be simple in SP: display the URLs of Word docs in a doc library. I can send the URL as a link in an e-mail, but I can't figure out how to display the URL in the public view. Please help.
What can one do to solve this? Here are some options:
1) As Joel said you can use Email as link option. It will open your email client and you will be able to c/p link from there
2) You can also try to find the URL of file by right-clicking on its name. It will open browser's default context menu. From here you can use Copy shortcut option to copy URL.
These methods are available but it is very hard to teach an IW to use them. The third one requires a little bit of work, but once completed will have URL displayed on screen next to file name.
Here is what you need do: with your SharePoint Designer create a workflow that will copy document URL to the “URL” column (you will need to add one) in your document library. Workflow will be triggered when document URL is modified. In my next post I will provide you with step-by-step guide on how to do this with your SharePoint Designer.
toni