Alonso Robles

Sometimes, I have a bit of free time. Over the last few months, I have spent a few moments on some old projects of mine that have been essentially abandoned. These projects (which I may mention at some later date since they are not complete at this time) use some open source technologies since I can’t afford to personally purchase licensing for most of the technologies that I use professionally. In any case, I have spent some time getting reacquainted with Ruby on Rails. During this learning journey, I have come across a plethora of information (some good, some bad) that have helped me get familiar with this technology again. And now I will share these resources with you…

• Ruby on Rails – The official web site has tons of goodies such as downloads, documentation, guides. This is a great place to get started.
• Railscasts – The best source I found with free Ruby on Rails screen-casts.

When doing custom development for MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0, the PeopleEditor class can come in handy. However, it seems that it begins misbehaving when the the Visibility attribute is changed from its default value of true. Recently, I had the need to make it disappear and reappear depending on certain conditions in a custom form that was developed and I ran into this problem. The work around simply involves using a display style attribute. To make control invisible, set the display style attribute value to none. To make the control visible again, set the display style attribute value back to block.

Here is a sample C# method that I used to make this happen:


private void SetPeopleEditorVisibility(ref PeopleEditor pe, bool visible)
{
  if (pe.Style.Keys.Count > 0 && pe.Style["display"] != null)
  {
    pe.Style.Remove("display");
  }
  if (visible)
  {
    pe.Style.Add("display", "block");
  }
  else
  {
    pe.Style.Add("display", "none");
  }
}

When developling for SharePoint, I find myself always turning on the call stack and disabiling the custom errors in my development environment. It really does help when trying to debug run-time problems. I know there a few posts out there that describe how to do this, but I figured I would repost it as a reference for myself (which you are welcome to use).

Just remember that I do this in my development environment only. I don’t recommend changing the web.config files in any other environment.

Enabling the Call Stack

Set the value CallStack attribute in the SafeMode element in the web.config file to true.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <SharePoint>
   <SafeMode MaxControls="200"
             CallStack="true"
             DirectFileDependencies="10"
             TotalFileDependencies="50"
             AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
    ...
   </SafeMode>
   ...
 </SharePoint>
 ...
</configuration>

Disabling Custom Errors

Set the value of the mode attribute in the customErrors element to Off.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <system.web>
   ...
   <customErrors mode="Off" />
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>

Enabiling Compilation Debugging

Set the value of the debug attriute in the compilation element to true.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <system.web>
   ...
   <compilation debug="true">
    ...
   </compilation>
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>

 Putting it all together

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <SharePoint>
   <SafeMode MaxControls="200"
             CallStack="true"
             DirectFileDependencies="10"
             TotalFileDependencies="50"
             AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
    ...
   </SafeMode>
   ...
 </SharePoint>
 <system.web>
   ...
   <customErrors mode="Off" />
   ...
   <compilation debug="true">
    ...
   </compilation>
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>