Category / Sharepoint 2010

by Simon Doy

Save typing when Manipulating SharePoint Solution Files in PowerShell


 

Introduction

 

One of the things that annoyed me with PowerShell and SharePoint are the following commands:-

  • Add-SPSolution
  • Update-SPSolution
  • Actually anything that requires a –LiteralPath parameter

Don’t get me wrong I think that using PowerShell to admin SharePoint is fantastic but these commands bug me because they require a full path to work correctly. Unfortunately you don’t seem to be able to use the full stop (or period) to represent the current directory.

So you cannot do something like this:-

Add-SPSolution .\mysharepoint.wsp;



Instead you need to do this:-


Add-SPSolution c:\thisisareallylongpath\release1\section2\mysharepoint.wsp



Solution


Anyway, that got me thinking surely there is a better way and I can save myself some typing.


The solution is to use the command Get-Location.


So instead you can do this:-


$curdir = Get-Location;
Add-SPSolution–LiteralPath $curdir”\mysharepoint.wsp”;



Actually there is a PowerShell Alias called gl which is a shortcut for the Get-Location command.


So the shortest version in terms of saving your typing fingers is this:-


$curdir = gl;
Add-SPSolution –LiteralPath $curdir”\mysharepoint.wsp”;



Really hope that helps save you some time, also love to hear any other alternatives, there is bound to be an even better way of doing this.
by Simon Doy

Introducing SPUrlExpressionBuilder to resolve SharePoint URL Tokens


Introduction

One of the great things when developing with SharePoint is being able to use URL tokens such as:-

  • ~SiteCollection – this will resolve to the current site collection root
  • ~Site – this will resolve to the current web root

For an extensive list of SharePoint URL tokens, take a look at Namwar Rizvi’s SharePoint Insight blog post, http://sharepoint-insight.com/2008/12/01/list-of-sharepoint-url-tokens/.

If you have done much with creating or modifying Master Pages or Page Layouts then these tokens become very useful to locate resources such as images, XSL or CSS files.

For example, to reference an image which is stored in a SharePoint Publishing web’s Site Collection Images folder you could use something like this:-

~SiteCollection/SiteCollectionImages/myimage.png.

Recently, I have been working with multiple language user interfaces and wanted to be able to display a different image based on the language. One of the steps to do this was to work out how to process these URL Tokens.

Solution

This is where the SPUrlExpressionBuilder class comes to the rescue. This class is part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls assembly.

To evaluate a string with a url token like ~SiteCollectionUrl/Images/MyImage.png you can use the following SPUrlExpressionBuilder class’s method EvaluateUrlExpression().

string imagePath = SPUrlExpressionBuilder.EvaluateUrlExpression("~SiteCollection/Images/myimage.png").ToString();