Gertjan's blog

Today while working with the required field attribute in a list I noticed that SharePoint reacted differently if you write TRUE in upper case. The disitinction is when you try to save a new form and some fields have required="true" instead of required="TRUE" then the lower case variant is not validated on the second postback. So when you first save the form and there are validation errors that are detected server side then on the second postback the required="true" variant is not validated but the required="TRUE" variant is. Strange.

On Internet I could not find a correct solution for implementing a back button in a survey. After some search I found some near implementations but not an implementation that fully worked. One that inspired me was http://sharepointbender.blogspot.nl/2012/04/creating-back-button-on-sharepoint-2010.html but I found the history.back(-2) not satisfying. I wrote my one version in Javascript that uses the FirstField parameter of the survey to implement a correct behaviour. I hope it makes you happy. In the edit form I added a script link to the code below and i added the following statement spbackButton.init("Name of list"); In an javascript file I included the following code. var spbackButton = (function () { var _prevFieldsArray = new Array(); var _currentStep; var _prevPageStep; function setCookie(c_name,value,exdays) { var exdate=new Date(); exdate.setDate(exdate.getDate() + exdays); var c...

This blog describes some problems that I faced when installing a SharePoint 2013 server Errors encountered The following error showed up When creating a site collection with a custom solution Unexpected Exception in SPDistributedCachePointerWrapper::InitializeDataCacheFactory for usage 'DistributedViewStateCache' - Exception 'System.InvalidOperationException: SPDistributedCachePointerWrapper::InitializeDataCacheFactory - No cache hosts present in the farm. The solution for this problem is to create a new Server AppFabric Cache host and can be found on   msdn . First I created a new SQL database with the name CacheClusterConfigurationDB After that I used the following powershell scripts to create a new Server Appfabric on the server. New-CacheCluster -Provider System.Data.SqlClient -ConnectionString  "Data Source=ServerName\SQL2012;Initial Catalog=CacheClusterConfigurationDB;Integrated Security=True" -Size Small Register-CacheHost -Provider Sys...

This article describes the problems I faced when migrating a SharePoint 2010 environment with SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting server to an SQL Server 2012 Reporting server. First thing to do after the installation of the SQL Server 2012 is install the SPRS service into SharePoint. This is perfectly described in the following technical article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492276.aspx Important to note is that the new Reporting module in SharePoint is converted to a Service application. So after you run the PowerShell commands you also need to create a Service Application for the reporting service. This is also perfectly described in the following article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492276.aspx However after upgrading we needed to change the software and SharePoint configuration a bit. Here below the changes that we needed to do. Web.config from SharePoint Webservices seems to be reset It looks like the web.config of the SharePoint Webservices is ...

Today I faced a problem. The ADFS certificate that we used for Office 365 was going to expire over 2 weeks. However the connection to Office 365 already was failing. I do not exactly know what the policy is for ADFS of outdated certificates but it looks like ADFS already invalidates certificates two weeks before they really expire. This is not an Office 365 problem because other services that used our ADFS also had the same problem. To solve it on the other services it was simply updating the thumbprint of the trusted issuer but how do you do this in Office 365? I succeeded with the following steps Start up "Microsoft Online Services-module for Windows Powershell". You can download this module for PowerShell if you not already done this on ( http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/ff652560.aspx  ). Connect to your Office 365 environement by the following statement $cred = Get-Credential Use your first admin account to login (the account with th...

Add external users to Office 365 Team Site It is possible to invite external users to your team site in Office 365. This blog describes how. First thing you need to do is enable the "External user invitations" site feature. You can do this by navigating to "Site Actions" => "Settings" => "Site collection features". Here you need to enable the "External user invitations" feature. When you activate the feature you get an Share Site option in the Site actions drop down. With this option you can invite external users. When you click this "Share Site" option you will get a form that looks like the form below. You can choose what right you give the user, a visitor (read only) or a site member (collaboration). You can just fill in an email to send the invitation to, this does not have to be an existing account. Also you have the option to fill in a personal message that will be included in the ...

In this article I will describe how you should set up a development computer to use an existing AD FS. First thing we need to do is to create a trust between the ADFS server and the development machine. You can do this by login in with RDP at the server that is running ADFS and start up the "AD FS 2.0 Management" that is found under the Administrative tools. When the AD FS 2.0 Management studio is started you need to navigate to the "Relying Party Trusts" in the left folder structure. Then you nee to select "Add Relying Party Trust..." in the right menu. This will open the "Add Relying Party Trust Wizard" as shown below. When clicked on "Start" the following screen will open. Here you can specify how the relying party configuration is configured. For a development machine it is most easy to select just the last option "Enter data about the relying party manually" In the next screen you can fill in a name and descr...