Corey Roth [MVP] : SharePoint Online, Visual Studio 11, Office 365

Importing Search Configurations with SharePoint Apps

CoreyRoth — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:21:44 GMT

The Office Developer Tools team snuck a new feature into the RTM version of the tools for Visual Studio 2012. This new feature allows you to deploy apps and actually alter the search schema on the host web. That’s right. You can deploy an app and it will directly change the search configuration on the host. They just released documentation on it a while back, but as usual, I wanted to share my experiences. That and I know you all like screenshots.

What does this feature actually do? Well let’s back up a bit. If you remember back from my post, Search is Everywhere, I mentioned the we now had the ability to export and import search settings. This works at the SSA, site collection, and site level and allows you to move everything from result sources to managed properties from one environment to another. This is big as it lets you finally promote search settings between environments and maintain a true SDLC when it comes to search. Why do we care about search configuration with apps? Well this allows the developer to package up search settings in Visual Studio 2012 and then move them to production without having to do manual steps or use PowerShell. This also means you could include search settings in an app that you would put in the Office Store. It certainly opens up possibilities.

To test this out, go to your source site collection and customize your search settings. In my example, I created a custom result source and some managed properties on our source site. In my example, I actually did this on an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013.

This particular result source does nothing exciting. It simply limits the search to documents, but it serves as a good example. I’ve also created a managed property mapped to the Author crawled property. You may already know about this part, but I am showing it for a reason.

Now, I am going to export my search settings of my site collection, by going to Site Settings –> Search –> Configuration Export.

At this point, I could manually import the search settings using Configuration Import on another site collection. However, we want to do this from an app. Let’s get started in Visual Studio 2012. Start by creating a new SharePoint-hosted app. Once it is created, add an item to the project and choose Search Configuration.

The next step will ask for the path to your configuration XML file that you exported.

At this point the process is done. It will show you an XML editor with the contents of your search configuration. According to the MSDN documentation, you then need to edit it and set the DeployToParent element to true.

We then need to grant permissions to access the Site Collection. To do this, open AppManifest.xml and then click on Permissions. On this tab, add a scope of Site Collection and set the value to Full Control.

At this point, we are are ready to deploy. In my example, I am taking my search configuration and deploying it to an Office 365 SharePoint Online tenant. When the app deployment completes, you’ll be prompted if you want to trust the app. Trust it and then you should see your app start page.

At this point, you are just going to see you default app start page. There is nothing visible in the application. Go to the Developer Site (or the site collection you deployed to) and go to the Site Settings. Then look at the Result Sources. If everything worked correctly, you should now see your new result source there.

It was successfully deployed. Now what about the managed property? Unfortunately, it is no where to be found. If you go back to Visual Studio and look at your XML, you’ll notice that your managed property definition is no where to be found there either. If you check the source file before you imported it though, you’ll see the definition. After I noticed this particular behavior, I reached out on Twitter and @chakkaradeep reached out to me and told me that managed properties aren’t supported in this deployment model. That made me kind of sad because that’s what I want to deploy the most. I’m sure there is a technical reason though that he’ll explain to me sometime though. You can still deploy managed properties via Configuration Import though which is still a great added feature of SharePoint 2013.

You might be curious if the result source is removed when you uninstall the app. It turns out that the changes are indeed removed when you uninstall.

Aside from the managed properties not being available, this is still a pretty cool feature and it has me thinking about some new things I can do that I didn’t think were possible before. I’m pretty excited to work with it more.

Slides from my SharePoint Online and Visual Studio 11 talks

CoreyRoth — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:53:42 GMT

It’s been a busy month for speaking (among other things). Last month, I spoke about getting started with SharePoint Online development at SharePoint Saturday New Orleans. The New Orleans crew (Cherie, Beth, and Tiffany) did a great job putting the event together. Here are the slides that I referred to in that talk.

Office 365 – Introduction to SharePoint Online Development

Last week, I made the trip over to San Antonio to see Tom Resing (@resing) and the fine folks there. There I presented to a full room of people looking to learn more about the new SharePoint development features in Visual Studio 11. If you have been following my blog lately, you know I have been posting a lot about the new features lately. As promised, here are the slides from that talk.

New Development Features in Visual Studio 11

For my next presentation, I’ll be speaking this week at the Houston Cloud Tech Symposium on 4/4. This is a new event for me so I’m not sure what it will be like. I’ll be talking about how you can use SharePoint Online for Extranets. If you are in Houston this week and are attending the event, come see me.

Finally, I’ll be presenting my Visual Studio 11 talk at SharePoint Saturday Houston later this month on 4/28. That event is always no less than epic so you need to be there.

Speaking at Office 365 Saturday Redmond!

CoreyRoth — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:45:29 GMT

I’m excited to be speaking at the first Office 365 Saturday in Redmond on 2/25. This new event will be an exciting display of all things Office 365. I’ll be talking about all of the cool things you can do with Search in SharePoint Online. I gave this talk at SPC11, but I gave the talk an upgrade with the use of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. We’ll look at what you can do out-of-the-box with search and then write a custom Silverlight application to query search web services. If you’re looking to get more out of search be sure to stop by and check out my session.

How to: Use the Silverlight web part with Visual Studio 11

CoreyRoth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:11:14 GMT

Visual Studio 11 adds a new feature that makes working with Silverlight in SharePoint 2010 a bit easier. The new Silverlight Web Part feature automates deploying your Silverlight applications to SharePoint and can really save you a bit of time. We took a look at how the Visual Web Part works in VS11 a while back. Now, let’s see what happens when we use Silverlight.

To work with Silverlight,you can either create a new project or simply add a new item to an existing project. I’ll start by creating a new project by choosing the item SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part. Remember the number of project types has been reduced in VS11.

After you provide the usual SharePoint specific information, a new screen will prompt you for information on your Silverlight application. You can use an existing application or let it create a new project for you.

You have a choice of Silverlight version 4.0 or 5.0. Once you finish, you’ll have two new projects to work with. The designer opens up and then we’ll just create a simple Silverlight application.

Now, let’s take a look at the files. They prove to be a lot simpler than you might think.

If we click on the web part itself, we actually see the contents of the .webpart file. Taking a quick look at it, reveals its simplicity.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<webParts>
  <webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
    <metaData>
      <type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SilverlightWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" />
      <importErrorMessage>$Resources:core,ImportErrorMessage;</importErrorMessage>
    </metaData>
    <data>
      <properties>
        <property name="Title" type="string">SilverlightWebPartProject1 - SilverlightWebPart1</property>
        <property name="Description" type="string">My Silverlight Web Part</property>
        <property name="Height" type="unit">300px</property>
        <property name="Width" type="unit">400px</property>
        <property name="Url" type="string">/SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap</property>
      </properties>
    </data>
  </webPart>
</webParts>

It simply has a reference to the existing SilverlightWebPart included in SharePoint 2010. It sets a few properties such as Title, Description, Height, Width, and Url. Here you will notice that it’s actually copying the .xap file from your Silverlight project into the SiteAssets library. Note, that this is the only place to set the dimensions of your web part.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1" List="113" Url="_catalogs/wp">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Url="SilverlightWebPartProject1_SilverlightWebPart1.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary" >
      <Property Name="Group" Value="Custom" />
    </File>
  </Module>
  <Module Name="SilverlightWebPart1">
    <File Path="SilverlightWebPart1\SilverlightProject1.xap" Url="SiteAssets/SilverlightWebPartProject1/SilverlightWebPart1/SilverlightProject1.xap" />
  </Module>
</Elements>

If we take a look at the Elements.xml file, we see that it deploys both the .webpart file and the .xap file using a Module element.

When you are ready to deploy just use the Deploy command in Visual Studio. It will build the Silverlight application, the .wsp file and send it to SharePoint. You no longer have to manually upload the .xap file (or add it manually to your package). Now, we can just add the web part to a page from the Insert ribbon.

Then you’ll have your Silverlight application on your page. Don’t be jealous of how great this one looks. :)

What about SharePoint Online? Does it work there too? Indeed it does. Just use the Publish feature I talked about earlier to deploy that solution to the cloud. One issue I did notice is that the path configured in the SilverlightWebPart is absolute. If you publish into a site collection not on the root, you’ll need to modify the path. I need to look at this one more since it might be based off of the local SharePoint site URL that you specified originally. Still it’s nice to know that it works. I tried it with an E3 account and I’m pretty sure it will work with P accounts as well.