Corey Roth [MVP] : Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint Designer

Deploying an External List via Feature using CAML #sp2010

CoreyRoth — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:33:13 GMT

I’ve been talking a lot about external lists lately as you may know. They are so easy to create with SharePoint Designer, but you wouldn’t really deploy them to production that way would you? Of course not! We need a feature. At first, you might think generating all of that CAML might be too difficult, but remember we can use the Save Site as Template page to generate a .wsp file for us. Using this we can import it into Visual Studio and learn what CAML we need to use.

We’re going to start with the same external list from yesterday. You can build your own using SharePoint Designer as described in my BCS post.

Once you are happy with your list, go to Site Settings –> Save Site as Template. Fill in the fields and it will save a solution package in your solution gallery of your site collection. Save the .wsp file to disk and we’re ready to begin. Once you have your solution package, open Visual Studio 2010, create a new project, and use the Import SharePoint Solution Package project template. You will be prompted for what site to use and where the package file is. On the next step, you will be prompted for what you want to import.

The solution package has every site column, content type, page, list, etc, on the site so there is a lot to sift through. However, the only thing we really need is the list instance in question (in my case Products). You will want to unselect everything else as it will take forever to import if you don’t.

Quick Tip: There isn’t a select all button, so press Ctrl+A, and then unclick a checkbox to deselect everything.

On the next step you will get a warning about dependencies. Go ahead and just say yes and your project will import. Your project will likely have a bunch of stuff you don’t really care about. All that you really need is what it is created in List Instances. Your list instance might look something like this.

At this point, I created a new project because I want to keep things clean. Create a new project and create a new List Definition. At this point, you will have a schema file and two new elements files. The elements.xml file with the list template can be deleted since I don’t want users creating new versions of this list. Before we start digging into the CAML that is required to make an external list work, let’s go back and look at SharePoint Designer so we can remember what our application definition looked like.

The reason I show you this is because these values we’re going to see when we take a look at our elements.xml file. Here is the file that came from the site export.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <ListInstance FeatureId="{00bfea71-9549-43f8-b978-e47e54a10600}" TemplateType="600" Title="Products" 
                Description="" Url="Lists/Products" CustomSchema="Files\Lists\Products\Schema.xml" 
                HyperlinkBaseUrl="http://sp2010/Test" RootWebOnly="FALSE" 
                xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <DataSource>
      <Property Name="Entity" Value="Products" />
      <Property Name="EntityNamespace" Value="http://sp2010/test" />
      <Property Name="LobSystemInstance" Value="bcs_test" />
      <Property Name="SpecificFinder" Value="Read Item" />
    </DataSource>
  </ListInstance>
</Elements>

A couple of things to note here. First, the TemplateType is 600. We can only presume this is the list template id for an external list. The other thing of note is the new DataSource element. This was not in previous versions of SharePoint. As you might notice here, these values correspond to what we see on the external content type. This is what you will change should you decide to rename the entity in or change the LobSystemInstance name. This XML is highly useable in our own feature, but I am going to remove some of the unnecessary attributes such as FeatureId and CustomSchema. I’m also going to give it a new Title so that we know this is a different list. Here is what my new elements.xml looks like.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <ListInstance TemplateType="600" Title="Products - Deployed by Feature" Description="" 
                Url="Lists/ProductsDeployedByFeature" HyperlinkBaseUrl="http://sp2010/Test" 
                RootWebOnly="FALSE" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <DataSource>
      <Property Name="Entity" Value="Products" />
      <Property Name="EntityNamespace" Value="http://sp2010/test" />
      <Property Name="LobSystemInstance" Value="bcs_test" />
      <Property Name="SpecificFinder" Value="Read Item" />
    </DataSource>
  </ListInstance>
</Elements>

Honestly, I think I can get rid of HyperLinkBaseUrl as well. It doesn’t seem to matter though, I deployed it to a few other sites and it seems to work fine. Now let’s take a look schema.xml. It’s actually pretty small which is nice compared to the files we were used to in the past.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<List Title="Products" Direction="none" Url="Lists/Products" BaseType="0" Type="600" 
      FolderCreation="FALSE" DisableAttachments="TRUE" Catalog="FALSE" RootWebOnly="FALSE" 
      SendToLocation="|" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/itgen.gif" xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" 
      xmlns:spctf="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/contenttype/forms" 
      xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <MetaData>
    <ContentTypes>
      <ContentType ID="0x01" Name="Item" Group="List Content Types" Description="Create a new list item." FeatureId="{695b6570-a48b-4a8e-8ea5-26ea7fc1d162}">
        <Folder TargetName="Item" />
        <FieldRefs>
          <FieldRef ID="{c042a256-787d-4a6f-8a8a-cf6ab767f12d}" Name="ContentType" />
          <FieldRef ID="{fa564e0f-0c70-4ab9-b863-0177e6ddd247}" Name="Title" Required="TRUE" ShowInNewForm="TRUE" ShowInEditForm="TRUE" />
        </FieldRefs>
        <XmlDocuments>
          <XmlDocument NamespaceURI="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/contenttype/forms">
            <FormTemplates xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/contenttype/forms">
              <Display>ListForm</Display>
              <Edit>ListForm</Edit>
              <New>ListForm</New>
            </FormTemplates>
          </XmlDocument>
        </XmlDocuments>
      </ContentType>
    </ContentTypes>
    <Fields>
      <Field DisplayName="BDC Identity" Hidden="FALSE" Name="BdcIdentity" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="BdcIdentity" Type="Text" />
      <Field DisplayName="Name" Hidden="FALSE" Name="Name" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="Name" Type="Text" />
      <Field DisplayName="Id" Hidden="FALSE" Name="Id" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="Id" Type="Integer" />
      <Field DisplayName="Color" Hidden="FALSE" Name="Color" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="Color" Type="Text" />
      <Field DisplayName="Description" Hidden="FALSE" Name="Description" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="Description" Type="Text" />
      <Field DisplayName="Price" Hidden="FALSE" Name="Price" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" StaticName="Price" Type="Decimal" />
    </Fields>
    <Forms />
    <Views>
      <View DisplayName="Products Read List" DefaultView="TRUE" BaseViewID="1" Type="HTML" MobileView="TRUE" MobileDefaultView="TRUE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/generic.png" XslLink="main.xsl" WebPartZoneID="Main" WebPartOrder="1" Url="Read List.aspx" SetupPath="pages\viewpage.aspx">
        <XslLink>main.xsl</XslLink>
        <Method Name="Read List" />
        <Query>
          <OrderBy>
            <FieldRef Name="Name" />
          </OrderBy>
        </Query>
        <ViewFields>
          <FieldRef Name="Name" ListItemMenu="TRUE" LinkToItem="TRUE" />
          <FieldRef Name="Id" />
          <FieldRef Name="Color" />
          <FieldRef Name="Description" />
          <FieldRef Name="Price" />
        </ViewFields>
        <RowLimit Paged="TRUE">30</RowLimit>
        <Aggregations Value="Off" />
      </View>
    </Views>
  </MetaData>
</List>

As you can see it’s pretty clean. It again uses the Type of 600. In the ContentTypes section, it does define a regular list item, but it doesn’t actually add any of the fields from the external list there. The Fields element has a field defined for each field in my external content type. As you can see there is nothing special about the way they are defined. The only one of note is the BdcIdentity field which I assume is required to keep track of the ID that ties back to the BCS itself. The View is surprisingly clean as well. The XslLink and Method elements are new. I assume we can use XslLink to customize how the view is rendered, but I didn’t actually see a main.xsl file generated in the solution package anywhere. The Method element I can only assume corresponds to the name of the finder method Read List which we have seen above. The rest is pretty simple. It just has a FieldRef for each column in my external content type.

I can pretty much use the Schema.xml file as is. I did change the Title and Url attributes at the top but that is it. At this point my new feature to deploy this is ready to go. Here is what it looks like in Visual Studio.

Deploy your solution and have it activate your feature. The new list won’t show up automatically in the navigation on the side, but it will be there. Just go to the URL directly or view the lists on your site to get there. Here it is on my new site.

As you can see it’s really not that hard to deploy an external list to another site properly using a feature. Now, you might have noticed there are a few other elements.xml files generated when we did the site export. One stores specific values in the property bag of the list. This we did not want because we don’t really want to copy those internal properties. The other deals with the forms of the list. It uses the BinarySerializedWebPart which scares me a bit, so I haven’t messed with it much. If you are just using default forms you don’t need to worry about it. In a future post, I’ll try seeing if I can deploy some InfoPath forms along with the list, but I figured that deserves its own post.

Also, one other thing to note. If you are deploying your external content type to another server, you can do that in the same manner as you did in SharePoint 2007. Just export the application definition and import it on the new server. You can also use the Export Application Model button in SharePoint designer on the External Content Types list.

I hope this helps when you look to move lists into production. This technique of exporting and importing will also work with regular lists of course. Just remember, friends don’t let friends deploy lists without a feature.

Features I am looking forward to the most in SharePoint 2010

CoreyRoth — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:47:36 GMT

I’m not privy to the NDA, so I got to look at some of the new SharePoint 2010 (#sp2010) information for the first time with the Sneak Peak videos on the Microsoft site. I’ll try not to just repeat information in the videos, but tell you what I am looking forward to and make comments. I am sure everything they have stated so far is subject to change, but if half of it even gets implemented we’ll be in good shape. As I was watching the admin video, the first thing that I noted is that there will be a logging database. This appears to replace the need to find errors in the 12 hive’s LOGS folder. This is very exciting and should make it much easier to track down problems. Also of interest is that there is much improved export support and you will be able to backup specific sites and lists. This one is a no-brainer and should have always been included to begin with.

Another thing I saw was various things to help support large lists. The first thing being an admin configurable threshold on allowing how many items can be displayed in the default view at a time. The default was 5000 in the demo, so I am wondering if this will be the new suggested limit as opposed to the existing 3000 item limit today. What is cool is that the interface will display all of the items for an administrator but it will notify a regular user that too many items have been returned and that they need to use a filter.

Visual Studio 2010 looks like it will be a great experience for developing SharePoint solutions. Out-of-the-box there is built in support for editing all types of things in SharePoint including importing workflows created by SharePoint Designer and existing .wsp packages. Building web parts no longer requires generating HTML via code due to the new Visual Web Part Designer. It appears they created a new typed called VisualWebPartUserControl which inherits from UserControl. You can drag and drop controls right onto the design surface and then easily deploy the web part with minimal effort. There are lots of designers and tools for working with the features and solution package itself, but it appears it takes care of most everything for you while still allowing you to customize things when you need to.

The changes to the Business Data Catalog really excite me. The BDC is now known as Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Application definition files can be created easily with Visual Studio 2010 or SPD. A visual design surface is available and allows you to easily create an application definition for an entity which comes from a database, web service, or .NET object. It also now has true insert/update/delete support and will create the methods in your application definition so that you can use that functionality later in a list. The new External List feature allows you to associate this application definition with a list and perform all of the CRUD operations on it just like it was a regular SharePoint list. This will make it very easy to integrate external data into SharePoint. My only question with this that comes to mind is there a way to customize the edit form or will that result in an unsupported scenario.

Some other cool things about the BCS is that it integrates with Office. Document templates can be created and data can be retrieved directly from the BCS to fill in values in a document. Microsoft Groove has been renamed SharePoint Workspace and provides a graphical interface for working with SharePoint. On top of that it provides the capability of syncing entire sites offline including BCS data. Documents can be updated and LOB data can be changed and then it can be synced back to SharePoint. I think this will provide great functionality for any type of field or remote users who are occasionally connected.

As a developer, another feature I was really excited about was LINQ support for SharePoint lists. You will be able to point the spmetal tool at a SharePoint list to generate a strongly typed data context class. You can then query the list as you would anything else using LINQ. I took a look at the CTP of the Developer Documentation today as well. It looks like all of the collections now have a method called GetTypeEnumerator(T). This returns an IEnumerator<T> which means any collection that implements this can also be queried with LINQ. I am really hoping this eliminates CAML queries, however I did see in the Client Object Model demo, that they still used a CAML query there. Since I brought up the Client OM, I’ll mention that there is a client object model available now for SharePoint which will make things like integrating with Silverlight very easy.

Unfortunately, they haven’t really produced any information about the changes in Search yet. I am looking forward to hearing most about those. Hopefully, they completely scrapped the Search Center and started over. I am wondering if there are any changes in the Records Center too. I also wonder how this will affect partners that have built tools around MOSS 2007. I can see Lightning Tools BDC Meta Man and AvePoint being directly affected. However, I am sure there will still be new areas for these companies to explore with the new product. This is an exciting time and I can’t wait for the public beta and to hear more about the product. Unfortunately, it’s not looking like I will make it to the SharePoint Conference this year, so I will have to be getting a lot of information second hand.

On a related note, don’t forget about the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group tonight.

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