Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to Application Pages in SharePoint Central Administration

about adding breadcrumb navigation to Application Pages. Bart Snyckers explained that the mechanism described in my post worked a little bit different if you want to add Application Pages to the Central Administration site. Bart doesn't have a development blog yet (but he told me he's working on one, and he's running a photo blog already), so I'm posting Bart's findings below. Thanks Bart!

Recently we also wanted to add breadcrumb navigation to some Application Pages for SharePoint, which we were using in our Central Administration, like the out-of-the-box Application Pages have. But it didn't worked out the way I wanted to. Google showed me the way to Jan Tielens’ blogpost about Adding breadcrumb navigation to SharePoint Application Pages, The easy way.

But after some research I found out that Application Pages that you want to show in the SharePoint Central Administration Site should be placed in different folders than normal Application Pages (in collaboration or publishing sites for example). When you are building up your 12-hive structure you should use 12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN for the Application Pages (*.aspx) and sitemap (admin.sitemap.*.xml) files, instead of the 12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS. If you mix up the .aspx and .sitemap files between the ADMIN and LAYOUTS folder, the breadcrumbs just don't appear at all and if you place everything in the LAYOUTS folder, the breadcrumbs don't work like you expect them to do. Further you have to reference the correct MasterPageFile from the ADMIN folder as well.

To deploy your feature and let SharePoint add the sitemap entries, you can use the methods described in Jan's article.Below you can find a small example to provision an Application Page in the Operations tab in your Central Administration:

Application Page (.aspx), deployed to 12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN

<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"%> 

<%@ Assembly Name="Example.SharePoint.CentralAdminApplicationPage, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2de06805bd3065de"%> 

 
 
<%@ Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/_admin/admin.master" 

         Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase" %>
 
 
 
<asp:Content ID="content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server">
 
      Central Administration Application Page
 
</asp:Content>
 
 
 
<asp:Content ID="content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="PlaceHolderPageTitle" runat="server">
 
    Central Administration Application Page
 
</asp:Content>
 
 
 
<asp:Content ID="content3" ContentPlaceHolderID="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea" runat="server">
 
   Central Administration Application Page
 
</asp:Content>

Sitemap (admin.sitemap.*.xml), deployed to 12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
 
<siteMap>
 
      <siteMapNode title="Central Administration Application Page" url="/_admin/CentralAdminApplicationPage.aspx" parentUrl="/_admin/operations.aspx"/>
 
</siteMap>

Feature (feature.xml)

<;Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"
 
  Id="{25397E25-C142-423a-97D2-AEA7BA6C0879}"
 
  Title="Central Administration Application Page"
 
  Description="Enables the Central Administration Application Page."
 
  Scope="Site"
 
  ReceiverAssembly="Central Administration Application Page, ..."
 
  ReceiverClass="Example.SharePoint.CentralAdminApplicationPage.FeatureHandler">;
 
  <ElementManifests>
 
    <;ElementManifest Location="customactions.xml"/>
 
  <;/ElementManifests>
 
<;/Feature>

Customactions (Customactions.xml)

<;Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
 
      <;CustomActionGroup
 
        Id="{79C8B7A7-E258-4835-B12D-D592F9CE100E}"
 
        Title="Central Administration Application Page"
 
        Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Operations"
 
        Sequence="100" />;
 
      <CustomAction
 
            Id="{828008F8-20DB-4224-8D2C-A4826C66E874}"
 
            Title="Example Application Page"
 
      

            GroupId="{79C8B7A7-E258-4835-B12D-D592F9CE100E}"
 
            Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Operations"
 
      

            RequireSiteAdministrator="TRUE"
 
            Sequence="10">;
 
            <UrlAction Url="/_admin/CentralAdminApplicationPage.aspx"/>
 
      <;/CustomAction>
 
<;/Elements>

Fixing SharePoint Breadcrumbs to Remove the Pages Node and Display the Page Title Instead of the ASPX Page Name

If you are customizing a master page and you find that the breadcrumb is being displayed with the Pages node and the name of the ASPX page like this

and you’d like the breadcrumb to be displayed in the standard publishing fashion without the Pages library node and with the page title instead

change the SiteMapProvider from SPContentMapProvider to CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode on the asp:SiteMapPath tag.

<asp:SiteMapPath SiteMapProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" id="ContentMap" SkipLinkText="" runat="server" PathSeparator=" :: "/>

How To Change The maximum Upload file size in SharePoint 2010

This morning I tried to upload a video file to our SharePoint 2010 install in preparation for a presentation tonight and then realised that the default 50mb file size limit was still set so while I was changing the settings to allow larger files I thought I would do a quick post on how/where the setting is and what to change.

First of all login to Central Admin and navigate to

Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Web Applications

Once there highlight the web application that you want to change and then click on general settings

Once in general settings scroll to the bottom of the list and you will see the maximum upload size the default setting is 50mb this can be can set to a maximum size of 2047mb. If you try to go beyond this it does flag up and tell you that you have exceeded the Maximum size.

Backup/Restore from one server to another or from one Site Collection to another (with PowerShell command) - SharePoint 2010: Backup/Restore with PowerShell Command – Part II

In some cases, you have developed a SharePoint site collection in your dev or stg machine and now you want to move the site with data from dev/stg to production. In such cases the process shown in the section “Backup/Restore in the same server and same site collection” will not work. The recommended way is to use PowerShell command to take backup and restore the backup.

Backup a Site collection with PowerShell command

In SharePoint 2010, PowerShell command Backup-SPSite is used for taking backup. you can get details of the command from the msdn link. The following command will backup the site collection ‘http://myserver’.

Backup-SPSite -Identity http://myserver -Path "c:\backup\file.bak"

Restore a Site Collection with PowerShell command

To restore site collection you’ll use the following command. Use –Force if you want to overwrite the existing site collection

Restore-SPSite -Identity http://myserver -Path "c:\backup\file.bak"

However, once I had restored the backup I could not access the site. The problem was that I needed to deploy the custom SharePoint solution. So in case of site collection migration (with backup/restore) from one server to another or from one site collection to another, the steps should be:

1. Restore the backup.

2. If your source site collection (from where you taken backup) uses custom SharePoint solution, then deploy the solution in the destination site collection (where you are restoring the backup). If you try to access the site without deploying solution then you may get the site non-functional.

3. Now you can try to access the site.

The important point here is that if you take backup from one server to another and restore it, the custom solution related to backup doesn’t go with backup. So after restoring backup you need to manually deploy the solution on the destination server. Then it’ll hopefully work.

Backup/Restore in the same server and same site collection - SharePoint 2010: Backup/Restore with PowerShell Command – Part I

If you want to backup/restore your site collection in SharePoint 2010, you can do with PowerShell command. I’ll spilt the post in two sections. One is on how to backup/restore in the same site collection and another is how to backup from one server/site collection to another. For the former (backup/restore in the same site collection), SharePoint provides nice easy GUI page in Central Administration page. However, for second one (backup/restore between different server) you need to run PowerShell scripts.

Backup/Restore in the same server and same site collection

Sometimes you may want to backup from a site collection and your intention is to restore the backup in the same site collection. One example might be you have a site collection, say “http://myserver” and you are going to run code to test something against the site. However, you fear that running the code may break something and before you run the code, you want to backup the site so that in case running the code breaks something you can restore the backup taken before running the code. In the case, where you need to backup/restore is centered around same server and site collection, you can take SharePoint Central administration UI to do the backup/restore.

Backup Steps

1. Navigate to the Central Administration => Backup and Restore

2. Under “Farm Backup and Restore” section click “Perform a backup”.

3. Now you’ll be landed in the following page where you can select the site or site collection you want to take backup:

4. Click next and you’ll be navigated to the following page where you can select backup type (full or differential) and backup location:

Restoring Steps

To restore follow the steps:

1. Navigate to the Central Administration => Backup and Restore.

2. Under “Farm Backup and Restore” section click “Restore from a backup”. Follow the wizard to restore from a backup.

Get recently Added\modified\updated list items in Sharepoint

Here are some options that you can use to figure out that .. what all items were recently added, modified or updated in a list or library.
Option 1 -
Create a View in your list or library and in view properties sort in by "modified" descending.Once done you can use this new view in your code to retrieve the newly added list items(top ones).
Option 2 -
Use the SPquery if you want to for e.g. get all the items added today or before your current date and time ( in descending order) so the latest gets on the top.
SPquery - Something like
"<OrderBy><FieldRef Name=\"Modified\" Ascending='False' /></OrderBy><Where><Lt><FieldRef Name=\"Modified\" />
<Value Type=\"DateTime\">"+ DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH\\:mm\\:ssZ") +"</Value></Lt></Where>"

The benefits of XsltListViewWebPart in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 provides new control to render the Lists - XsltListViewWebPart, that replaces previous controls, such as ListForm, ListView, DataFormViewPart

The benefits of the XsltListViewWebPart are summarized in the following table

Source