SharePoint Online How To Search and Display Custom Metadata

Handling custom columns in search in Office 365 / SharePoint Online isn’t the easiest of processes and there are a number of things that can easily throw you.

The net result will be one of three things:

1. Site columns not displayed in custom display templates.
2. Site Columns not refinable.
3. Site columns not searchable.

These three symptoms are all loosely related and stem from not setting up your search schema and result types correctly.

Search has many moving parts in it and to make matters worse the options available differ between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On Premise.

I’ll look at the three issues in more depth before moving onto how to configure a column so it is displayed, refinable and searchable.

Adding Bootstrap to SPFx web parts

Hi Folks

So we have an SPFx web part that shows how to integrate the React ‘Thinking’ tutorial with the SPFx tutorial but it looks pretty nasty:

SharePoint 2016 – An Introduction

So its released and the question is what doe sit bring to the table?

First off useful links to general start points:

• For General Information: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com
• For Technical Information: http://technet.microsoft.com/sharepoint/fp142366
• For IT Professionals: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261970.aspx

 

SharePoint 2013 App Testing – First Steps

There is a reason why we can’t use a Sandboxed Solution for our Enhanced Records Management as unfortunately they are not supported in SharePoint Records Centers, we have checked in 2010 and 2013 and it appears to be a long standing bug see https://simpleinnovationassociates.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/sandboxed-solutions-and-sharepointrecords-centres/.

So our Office 365 offering will be a SharePoint App but how do we know even that will work in a SharePoint 2013 Records Center?

In this case we need to establish what is the minimum required for success.  We need to remove anything that will cloud the issue, and in this case that’s any functionality.

A site administrator must be able to install a SharePoint 2013 Application into a SharePoint Site built with the Records Center (OFFILE#1) Site Template.

We don’t care what the SharePoint Application does we just need to know that it will install without error.

So what we need is the simplest possible SharePoint Application, in the simplest possible environment.

A good primer for this can be found in http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft%C2%AE-SharePoint%C2%AE-2013-Development-ebook/dp/B00B8D47F2 and using this we can write a simple SharePoint 2013 Application and deploy it internally via our own application store.

This should be a suitable task for someone to undertake tomorrow.

 

Cheers

Sebastian

Writing the Documentation for a Design Up Front

Well this turns out to be far harder than you would think it is.

Once you put yourself in a user’s shoes things look very different.

I started the User Guide 1.1 for the next release of the Enhanced Records Management product and immediately realised that the vocabulary in version 1.0 is hopeless unless you already know both SharePoint and the architecture of the solution.  I started a glossary translating Records Management vocabulary into SharePoint Records Management vocabulary and this I realised was a dead-end in itself.  I used a bit of my misunderstanding of Stanislavski and imagined I was a Records Manager whose main concern was to care for my records.  I don’t know SharePoint and frankly I haven’t got time to learn it.  I do have a SharePoint Records centre though and I have to use it.  In my old friend Ed Texeria’s words:

What’s the least I need to know?

Not much it turns out.

• What policies have been set up to govern retention?
• How do I change the policies?
• What events do those policies depend on?
• Which records are dependent on which policies and hence which events?

Hold on even that’s thinking in a ‘data centric’ sort of manner.  Lets try again but this time thinking of it from arriving in the morning with a steaming mug of coffee.

• What records do I need to deal with today?
• What records do I really need to deal with today because they are overdue?
• Are there any records that I don’t have a policy for?
• How can I set up a policy for records that don’t have one?

Interesting I’d probably change the first two round now I think further.  It seems to me that getting those things right is what my job is all about.

I probably have some other responsibilities that occur on a less frequent basis and I may even have staff who can help me so once we have dealt with the critical matters what would the next most likely things to occur during the day?

• I’ve had a request about a topic how do I satisfy it?
• How do I find out what happened to the record the auditors are asking about?
• Have any of the projects closed or any one left us, as due to this event I need to start the clock running on all the relevant records?

Okay that’s probably enough to get going on for now.  What is interesting is that none of this cares about how I do it I could be using a paper based system and the questions would be the same.   Also looking at the questions it seems that the ‘keywords’ are:

• Record(s)
• Policy
• Overdue
• Find
• Audit
• Event

The Record(s) is interesting because I want to deal with records in groups to reduce the time it takes.  I know that the record management vocabulary for a group of records that will be handled simultaneously is a ‘part’ and that a ‘class’ is a records management term for a branch in a ‘file plan’ whilst a ‘part’ is a leaf and the only thing that can contain a ‘record’.  So adding these to my other keywords gives me a very small vocabulary to start with:

• Record
• Part
• Class
• File plan
• Policy
• Overdue
• Find
• Audit
• Event

I’m sure more will crop up later but that’s enough for now.

So in my introduction I want to define these terms so that as a Records Manager I know that this manual is speaking my language, not some techies.

Onwards!

Sebastian

Unit Testing SharePoint 2013 with Visual Studio 2012

Hello Once More

Yes it is possible to do this and its easier now than in Visual Studio 2010.

If you own Ultimate then there are shims and mocks ready rolled but if you don’t you can use SharePoint itself.  This will make these Integration Tests rather than Unit Tests but having been using them for a day I’ve already caught three minor issues in under an hour.

1. Use Visual Studio to create your SharePoint project as normal.
2. Use Visual Studio to create a Test Project as normal.
3. Add a project reference from the Test Project to the SharePoint Project.
4. In the Test Project ensure that Test > Test Settings > Default Processor Architecture > X64 is selected in order to avoid this error:

Microsoft SharePoint is not supported in 32-bit process. Please verify that you are running in a 64-bit executable.

Then write your user tests as normal and off you go.

Cheers

Sebastian