.NET From India

Changing Document Library’s Website URL in SharePoint 2010

When you create a document library in SharePoint, the two properties that are highly visible to the end user is the Name and the Website URL. The name is what the document library is called and URL is the obviously the URL of the library .

Normally both of these are the same. i.e. if you name your library test, then your URL is usually http://sharepointsite/test

The problem is what if you need to rename your library (or you made a spelling mistake).

For example, instead of naming my library “Test Rename”, I called it “Test Renme” here.

So the document library’s name is set to “Test Renme” and the URL is set to "http://intranet/Test%20Renme”.

 

 

 

Now I need to go and edit these two properties and correct my mistake. Obviously the next step is to go to the document library properties and change this, Right??

 

Well in SharePoint 2010, there is not easy way to change the website URL property. You can change the name as many times as you want, but the URL remains what you created initially.

Here, if I use the in built UI to rename the library, the name changes, but the URL as you can see in the below image stays the same.

 

So basically, if you made a mistake naming your library when you created it, you are pretty much stuck with the mistake being a part of the URL, if you need to use only the inbuilt UI.

To change the UI you need to use SharePoint Designer 2010. Also though there are a few posts online on how to do this, most of them just say use SharePoint Designer and rename and it is not that simple. The whole point of my writing this post is because, it took me quite a while to figure out the right way to do this.

In SharePoint Designer you can open the library and use the Rename button in the ribbon and this does exactly what the inbuilt UI does and just changes the name and it has no impact on the URL.

The way to change the URL is to first not open the library, but rather for to the All Files option.

This gives you access to all folders in your site.

 

 

 

 

In this view select the library you want to change and right click on it. Then choose the Rename option in the menu.

This will bring up a dialog for you to enter the new name. Once you ok the dialog, you will get a progress indicator popup and then your URL gets renamed.

What happens behind the scene is important. When you rename this way, what happens is that a new library with the new name is created and all items are copied from the existing library to the new one and then the existing library is deleted. Why is this important? Well the number of items in your current library decides how long the rename takes. More items and bigger items increases the overall time. So it is better you get all your renaming done before you really start using your library.

Also, I am not sure if any parts of the library (history, workflow etc.) go missing on doing this (a bug maybe??). So if you rename a existing production document library, I would recommend you check related data to make sure that everything is fine (and obviously make a backup before you rename).

MOSS - Great Links

Here are a couple of great links to MOSS resources I came across when searching for some information related to MOSS.

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007
Clinic 5046: Inside Look at Building and Developing Solutions with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 - Free Elearning course
SharePoint 2007 Developer Resources - A super big list of SharePoint Links
Things to Consider for SharePoint Performance
Sharepoint Developer VPC and Hands On Lab - One of the toughest things with starting off with Sharepoint is to have to setup so many other softwares . This VPC is a great way to start off your learning spree without too much of a hassle. Note this contains only Sharepoint Services WSS, not MOSS

What should you be learning this year?

I do get asked a lot of questions on what is the best technology to learn. Obviously, depending on what a person currently knows, this question also has options added. So it is usually, .NET or Java, VB or C#, SQL Server or Oracle etc..

And in most cases my answer depends on what I know of the person asking the question. Obviously, a generic answer is mostly useless. But then I do have some advice for you this year if you are a web application developer working on ASP.NET or related technologies.

Learn MOSS 2007.

Categorized Search Results in MOSS

As you may have noticed I have been doing a lot of Sharepoint related work recently. Search is one of the main feature of MOSS, that is one of the most important feature considered by a enterprise. If people have to use a document management system, they have to be able to find their documents easily and a good search is very important.

One of the features I wanted to give to my users was the ability to filter based on some peices of Metadata like the document type or maybe categories. This is very similar to the option that most ecommerce sites have where you can drill down into a product category based on some properties of the product you select. But Sharepoint search does not have something like this by default.

I found a component in Codeplex called Faceted Search which adds this feature to MOSS. This is a set of webparts that allows you to do this with ease. You can actually use any coulmn in the document library to on which facets can be created.

Document Link Content Type

I have a need where I have a single document, but it should appear in multiple folders (Wanted something like Vista's Virtual Folders) in SharePoint. One of the new features in MOSS is that of content type and there is a content type called Document Link, that allows you to link to a document in another document library. Todd Klindt has a very detailed post about this.

This works fine, expect for one problem. Sharepoint does not consider the link to be pointing to another Sharepoint document library. So if you click on the link to open the document in MS Office (2003), Office does not recognize it as from MOSS and show you the edit and check in options that it would show if you had directly clicked on that document. The link always opens the document as read only.

Does anyone know how to get around this??