SharePoint 2010 - Update All List Items SharePoint Designer Workflow Action

Out of the box - SharePoint provides quite a few different Workflow Actions, but strangely missing was a Workflow action that can loop through and update all items within a list.

Figure: Update List Item (but only works with one item)

Further to my shock was that someone out there (cough Codeplex) hasn't written one yet. So last night I sat down and start to code.  There will be another article about coding and packaging a SharePoint Workflow Activity, but right now, I need to shove my baby out the door.

UPDATE LIST ITEMS v1.0 INSTALLATION

Everything in one WSP file: grab it here

The package includes 3 objects:

• WorkflowActivity.dll - goes in the GAC
• WorkflowActivity.ACTIONS - goes into <SharePointRoot>\TEMPLATE\1033\Workflow\WorkflowActivity.ACTIONS
• <authorizedType> entry needed in Web.Config - I've included a Web Application feature that will do this

To activate the web application feature

UPDATE LIST ITEMS v1.0 USERS GUIDE

In SharePoint Designer, select the "Update All List Items" action from the menu

Or just do the inline typing

There is only 1 dialog for this action - I cheated and reuse the dialog from Update Item Workflow Action

Unfortunately, because I cheated and use Microsoft's dialog - it won't let us finish without specifying a List Item - hence I use the sentence "Update all items in this list (ignore list item)" - sorry - hope that was clear.

OK and trigger the workflow

SUMMARY NOTES

1. In SharePoint, a workflow can not trigger itself. So even though I have the workflow set against this list - it is only run on the last item.
2. And because this is version 1 (v1.0) there's some really complex looking code for setting "People or Group" values. So I'm not sure if this works 100% in my implementation.
3. Obviously, if your list is extremely large you are on your own :-)
4. One other scenario this opens up is the facility to have a site workflow "trigger" a second workflow set on a particular list (remember - workflow can't trigger itself).

Silverlight - merging detached object back to the attached data context

This is a short post on something that we did in the days of Silverlight 2~3, before we have RIA services.

Consider two method signatures on the service:

1. public EntityPerson GetPerson(object key);
2. public void SavePerson(EntityPerson person);

Silverlight gets an EntityPerson object, exposes it via the ViewModel for databinding.  The user hits the save button, and the data is coming back through the wire.

It comes back to SavePerson, but the object is disconnected.

The way we've always done this is this way:

//Update or Insert person:
if (entityPerson.PersonID > 0) //update 
{
    EntityKey key = entities.CreateEntityKey("tblPerson", entityPerson);
    object originalItem;
    if (entities.TryGetObjectByKey(key, out originalItem))
    {
        // merge changes from the client back to the dataset
        entities.ApplyPropertyChanges(key.EntitySetName, entityPerson);
    }
}
else//insert new 
{
    entities.AddObject("tblPerson", entityPerson);
}

ApplyPropertyChanges works very well and takes a lot of the work out of our hands.  You can attach a very simple conflict detection if you have a Timestamp field, and by setting the ConcurrencyMode=Fixed.

Saving Changes and Managing Concurrency
How to: Manage Data Concurrency in the Object Context
Flexible Data Access With LINQ To SQL And The Entity Framework

I was recently involved in a short discussion on this topic, and was intrigued to go digging and get to the bottom of it all.  Hope these links help someone :-)

SharePoint 2010 - Configuring List Item Permissions with Workflow

The client had a pretty "simple" situation where:

1. We want to create a Request list where different people in the company can add requests, but assign it to a department.
2. Once created, only members in that department has access to this request item

PERMISSION GROUPS

You can use Active Directory groups here as well.  Here are my four security groups

DEPARTMENT LIST

I plan to use re-usable workflows later to configure the list item permissions.  So I need to create a few site columns, here's the first one DepartmentGroup.  This is basically a People or Groups field.

I create a list for the department, thus:

REQUEST LIST

Here's the second site column.  This is a lookup column to the Department list.  I'm bringing over the ID field as an additional field.

Add a few records:

REMOVE LIST PERMISSIONS

Stop inheriting permissions from parent (site), and do a bit of house cleaning and remove the unnecessary groups.

LET'S WORK ON THAT WORKFLOW

The idea of the workflow is that:

1. Whenever an item is updated
2. Look up the group based on the selected Department (via the additional ID field)
3. Assign item-level security to the list item
4. Remove permissions to modify the item, and grant the department group permission to view and modify that request.

Create a re-usable workflow.  Target any content type.

We'll need the lookup site column, so associate that

The permissions steps need to be run as impersonated steps.  The impersonated steps can not be mixed with the normal steps (such as Step 1)

Remove (unused) Step 1, and add "Replace permission" action

Start with the second parameter which is the easier one.  Click on "this list" and select Current Item

Click on "these permissions" and we want Contribute and Read permissions

Click on "Choose" and set who we'll be granting Contribute/Read to

Select "Workflow Lookup for a User…" and click Add
We want to do a look up on the Department list.

The field we want is DepartmentGroup (our Person and Group site column).  Return the field as Login Name
Set the filter Field below to ID

Set the filter Value field to Current Item.Department:ID

(You can also use the DepartmentLookup field here, just return it as Integer)

Final result:

OK everything.  Remember to save and publish

Go back to SharePoint list

Configure the workflow and make sure it runs when a list item is created or modified

VERIFY RESULTS
Check the permission of our first request (before the workflow)

It is inheriting from list.  Nothing special.

Create a new request for our Network department - see the workflow has completed

Check its permissions

"NetworkHeroes" has been assigned "Contribute" and "Read" permissions to the list item - everyone else has been stripped out.
The List Item has also stopped inheriting permissions from the parent list.

SUMMARY

So the solution works and is relatively elegant.  Though the client mocks me and says it was so much more easier in Lotus Notes :-(

The following features in SharePoint 2010 makes this example a little bit cleaner than with SharePoint 2007:

• "Additional Fields"
• Impersonation Step
• Re-usable Workflows
• Replace Permissions Action

Windows Live Messenger wave 4 - redir.us freaks me out

Colleagues send me links via MSN to a web page, and I see

Immediately started freaking out - what is rdir.us?
Not many people have written about this - the best I've found is Rafael's post here:

Live Messenger and the “link harvesting black box in the sky”

Short story:

• rdir.us is Microsoft Internet SmartScreen Filter
• It looks safe, but there's no way to turn this off.
• If the URL was http://link.smartscreen.live.com/?l=http://digg.com it wouldn't have looked as scary.
• I really wish it didn't give me such a fright
• Oh http://rdir.us doesn't have any explanation page

Silverlight PivotViewer and SharePoint

Microsoft just released a new control PivotViewer for Silverlight. 

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/

If you haven't seen this yet - go check out the video then come back, I'll wait here.

It's a web-based control to provide pivot functionality for datasets.  For fixed data - you can pre-generate the data set. For dynamic data, the collection could be generated dynamically and served.

So what would happen if you throw it at SharePoint, I ask?

The initial results are astounding!  Check these out:

Figure: Connecting it to listdata.svc OData service

At the root level it really is quite boring.

Figure: Connecting to a document library OData service

OK this is getting fun.  Facets!  Sort/Display/Zoom

Figure: Sorting the document library by Modified date

You probably can see I've uploaded a bunch of documents in the last hour :-)

The screenshots don't do this justice - when you filter down, change sort… the boxes fly all over the place it's as if I'm literally shaking SharePoint apart to zoom in on my data.

So it looks like I'll be extremely busy next couple of weekends and evenings:

• Generate collection data across site - this will let me filter the "Path" facet to select which list/document library I'm after
  • What does this mean for big sites?
• Add more visualizers, use Word/PPT thumbnails
• Create configurable background colours for different content types
• Add a contextual menu and hook it back through SharePoint actions
• And the Holy Grail - is it possible to make this work as a Sandbox Solution?
  • The current sample reference application requires IIS HttpHandlers to serve dynamic collection data consumed from OData. 
  • Sandbox solution problem may be tricky.

It's times like this I stood back and appreciate what Microsoft does.  You guys are awesome.  Different teams produce different software and they just magically work together.  Makes us look like heroes.

/Salute