BinaryJam

Whether or not SharePoint actually needs an autocomplete for it’s search box could be debated, and the manner in which I’m about to implement it, well that could be debated also. 

The point of this post was to use jQuery techniques to query a list via its web services and do something flash.  I’m doing it SharePoint 2007 as that is what I have handy and working. 

I will be upfront and honest right now, the code for this is a Mashup from two sources, Jan Tielens and the jQueryUI demo itself, both needed tweaking to come up with something new, but just so you know it’s not been rocket science, hard work was done for me, cheers Jan. 

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I’ve been having a problem with an app I wrote.  It works great, 99% of the time, but sometimes the ItemAdded event appears not to fire.

Now this is using a list with over 20,000 entries in it and its growing all the time.  An associated list that references this list as a lookup has over 144,000 entries in it.

The event firing problem is becoming more frequent now as more users start using the system, there are at least 20 occurances in that 20,000 items, so it has to be fixed.

Managed to track down an error in the log

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Transaction (Process ID 61) was deadlocked on lock | communication buffer resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

It’s stack trace was similar too this (I cut it down a bit and changed some names, my naming is not this bad)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItemCollection.EnsureListItemsData()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItemCollection.get_Item(Guid uniqueId)
   at BinaryJam.Core.Code.TicketListReceiver.ItemReceiver.ItemAddedActual(Guid SiteId, Guid ListItemId, String UserDisplayName)
   at BinaryJam.Core.Code.TicketListReceiver.ItemReceiver.<>c__DisplayClass11.<ItemAdded>b__e()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevatedWrapper(Object state)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.<>c__DisplayClass4.<RunWithElevatedPrivileges>b__2()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SecurityContext.RunAsProcess(CodeToRunElevated secureCode)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(WaitCallback secureCode, Object param)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(CodeToRunElevated secureCode)
   at BinaryJam.Core.Code.ItemListReceiver.ItemReceiver.ItemAdded(SPItemEventProperties properties)

So as you can see, it explodes on the GetItem.

This was my stupid mistake, a mistake I bet many of you are making every day.

SPListItem item = List.Items[listItemId];

This I believe is the primary cause of the problem as this statement loads the complete List before returning the specific item I needed and as this list grows, remember 20,000 items already, its going to get worse.  Now for most of you this won’t be a problem as you will be just getting the ListItem from the parameters, in my case I have to run as elevated as Im doing lots of stuff with Security Groups, that the entering user may not be in, hence my needing to re-get the List Item in the right security context.

So if your having a problem like this remember, Always use the

List.GetItemByID(id); //Or
List.GetItemByUniqueId(guid);

This may or may not solve my problem I believe it will, if it doesn’t it’s still going to improve the performance of my application.  If your wondering, this is the only time I use this and don’t know why I did, the rest of the App uses getby id or SPQueries.

A Good Article on Performance I did actually read, hence the app performs pretty well, except for this one bug, which is now hopefully fixed.

Been having a problem with SiteProvisioningProvider. Well I haven’t but apparently it causes problems down the line if things are not done in a specific order.

A nice man at microsoft diagnosed the problem and came up with the code you should run to ensure your not messing up the Web.

Here is a posting of the proposed solution to the bug we found (I don’t care if they don’t think its a bug, not sure if they do or don’t but I do!)

http://blogs.msdn.com/joerg_sinemus/archive/2009/11/24/overwriting-spwebprovisioningprovider-provision.aspx

I am doing lots of work in Sharepoint that requires resource files in english and german.

With a variety of developers before me different styles of editing the foreign language files emerged.

I think that much better tool support for managing resx’s is required,  and I recently found one that is a great help to us with a vareity of resx’s in various states of translation and existence.

http://resxtranslator.codeplex.com/

This resx tool allows you to pick a file and it displays the nuetral and foreign side by side along with comments and allows you to edit them all at once.  Corking piece of work, some polish would go amiss but Im hard pushed to say where as it does exactly what I need it to do and I can pass it to a non-techie developer.  It still down to me to edit the comments first to identify what needs translating and what definately needs leaving alone.

If you doing multi-language work go and check this tool out it might just help.

I have had to try and create a Search page that displays its result set in the style of a ListViewWebPart.  This has proven quite tricky.

After a lot of Searching I found various articles on using SPQuery and then the List.RenderAsHtml(Query) to achieve this.  However I found a rather large problem with this method, whilst it queries what I want it to the resulting HTML looks nice but does not do any kind of paging also whilst the sort and filter  drop downs appear at the top of the columns, they don’t actually do any sorting or filtering.

Now that was completely unacceptable.

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