Expiscornovus

Gonna try and post some more troubleshooting articles, just like my colleague Michaël. This time an article about a problem in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The problem
A customer came across a security exception error. But it didn’t always show up. Turned out it only showed when she was routed to a certain Web Front End, WFE02. You can see the error below in a screenshot.

The cause
The application wanted to write an event in the event log of WFE02 but wasn’t able to because the event source doens’t exist. It also doesn’t have rights to create the event source. That is why it is throwing an exception.

The solution
Temporarely give the application pool account that is used as identity of the web application local administrator rights on the WFE02.

1. Find out what the application pool identity is from your SharePoint web application. Go to IIS manager in administrative tools or type the command inetmgr in the run box.

2. Go to Server Manager in administrative tools. Open the Configuration tab and go to Local Users and Groups and go to the Administrators Group.

3. IISreset the web front end by typing the command iisreset in the run box.

4. Remove the application pool identity from the administrators group.

Now the event source can be created and the items will be posted in the event log. The customer will see the .aspx page again.

In this case it turned out to be that the application wanted to write information events in the event log. Can be really annoying if your application won’t run right because of some information logs.

Lately I’m building different kind of features, which can be very easy and interesting, but more on that later on. When I tried to bind some of those features to different kind of lists I came across the subject of ListTemplate ID’s.

ListTemplate ID’s
Every ListTemplate is associated with a different kind of ID, a value which can be used within a feature. For instance, a announcements list template is associated with the value 104. This can be very useful if you want to bind your feature to just document libraries.

	
		
			DeletingEventHandler
			ItemDeleting
			10000
			DeletingEventHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=f5cce5f062aa189d
			DeletingEventHandler.DeletingAction
			
			
		
	

The example above shows how to use a event receiver in your elements.xml file of a feature. In this case my event handler feature registers receiver for the ItemDeleting event of a Announcements list template. It uses my custom code described in the DeletingAction class (.cs).

Reference ListTemplate ID’s.
It can be useful to know the different kind of ListTemplate ID’s when you create features. When googling I came across some reference posts on ListTemplate ID’s. I decided to put them together into one table and added two Listtemplate ID’s I discovered myself. I found 1300 Translation Management library & 1301 Languages & Translations. For all the others ID’s the credits go to MSDN library, Mike Smith & Alex from Phase 2.

If there are any errors in the table above or you have new ID’s please let me know.

About 3 years ago this was one of the first questions I got when I started my first internship. Back then I was working with Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 & WSS v2. Soon I discovered it wasn’t as easy as it looked, but I got the basic idea. Every modification was by hand, but has something changed since then?

Classic 2003 way to create a custom theme
Create a custom theme the ’2003 way’ was mainly copying, pasting & editing files on the sharepoint web server. Especially the editing of the theme stylesheet, which contains a enormous amount of elements & classes, was a hell of a job. Fortunately tools like Color cop & Internet Explorer developer toolbar made it a bit manageable. Also resources like Heather Solomon’s CSS reference guide were pretty useful.

The basic steps were:
1. Copy a existing theme on the MOSS web server
2. Renaming setup file (.inf)
3. Modifying the stylesheets, images
4. Adding the theme to the TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML file

If you are searching for howto’s I can recommend articles from: Sharepoint End User Content Team, Tigirry’s Sharepoint Blog & Dan Lewis

Creating a custom theme MOSS style
Since then a lot has changed in the world of Sharepoint. Cool things like solutions, timer jobs & features were introduced with the release of MOSS. But googling on “create custom theme moss” still gives the same result. Copying & editing theme files on the web server.

Has nothing really changed since then? No, some things have changed, thanks to the wonderfull MOSS community.

That is also the main reason of this post. Two days ago I came across a this post from Keith Dahlby from Solutionizing.net about his STSDev Theme solution generator. He wrote that he added this option to the codeplex project STSDEV. It automates all step 1,2 & 4 described in the 2003 way and adds it to a Visual Studio project. And instead of manually copying it to the web server it creates a solution!

Adding import technique to Theme solution project in VST
One of the drawbacks of this was that if you upgrade the theme solution you still had to re-apply it by hand to the sites that are already using it. In some scenario’s this can be a problem. At this point the @import technique described by Heather Solomon comes around the corner. Keith Dahlby was already talking about implementing this in his generator, so looking forward to it.

In the meantime I manually added the import technique to my Visual Studio project, this is how I did it.

1. Follow Keiths steps described in this post to develop a theme solution project with STSDEV found on Codeplex

2. Create a new folders in the ROOTFILES directory for your theme.css file, I use the LAYOUTS/1033/STYLES/ location, as described in Heather’s @import technique post.

3. Copy your theme.css file from the THEMES folder in ROOTFILES into the newly created folder in step 2

4. Edit the theme.css file in the THEMES folder by removing al styles and replacing it by the single line:
[sourcecode language=css]@import “/_layouts/1033/styles/ExpiscornovusTheme/theme.css”;[/sourcecode]

5. That’s it, if you build the project you get a solution file (.wsp). Next time you upgrade your theme solution you don’t have to re-apply the theme to every individual site that uses it, just press (ctrl + ) F5!

Customizing
Although this solution makes the creation and deployment of custom themes a lot easier it is still a good idea to think about customizing. Customizing a theme is still basicly editing a extensive CSS file. If you want it to look completely different from the basic MOSS look be aware this could be a hell of a job with all those elements. If you want to read more about theme customization I can recommend one resource in general: Heather Solomon’s blog. She has a lot of great articles on customizing, so definitely visit that blog.

Update 07-10-2008
Removed step 5 because the ddf & manifest files are modified during the rebuild process.