Sharepoint 2007: what do developers need to know?

Question

I have worked with Sharepoint 2007, and as a developer, it was a nightmare. I left my internship after 1 month because of this technology.

I thought that all developers would think similar to me, but this question has taught me a differenly. It seems possible for a developer to say "I love Sharepoint". Perhaps they've fallen into madness.

I'm not asking for information about Sharepoint which could be easily found in books, but what war stories or personal anecdotes do you have about Sharepoint 2007 development?

Perhaps format your responses this way:

Problem : Problem to solve which "should" be easy to do but isn't.

Solution : Solution or nasty tricks to know to resolve the problem.

Answer 1

Problem: "Join" data from multiple lists (especially with diferent fields) Solution: Lookup fields might help in few cases, but most of the time you have to join the list items programatically.

Answer 2

Here are a few basic but frustrating ones:

Problem: You can’t use the title of a wiki page as a lookup on another list.

Solution: Create a text field on the list which you manually complete with the same information and use that as the lookup.

Problem: Users with Office 2003 can’t edit a PDF document directly on the SharePoint site (not a misprint; Office 2007 is required to edit PDF documents on SharePoint).

Solution: Download the file, edit it locally then upload it over the original one.

Problem: It’s not possible to see the amount of data used by a site collection unless a quota has been applied.

Solution: Apply a quota template, even it’s just a very large one.

More than happy to be proven wrong on any of these!

Answer 3

It would probably take a couple encyclopedia sized books to answer this question. Here are just a couple off the top of my head.

Workflow:

Problem: After creating a workflow using SharePoint Designer, you want to copy or move the workflow to a different list.

Solution: Copy and paste the workflow's XML configuration files. Then find and replace all of the old list's GUIDs with the new list's GUIDs.

Searching with Enterprise Search SQL (ESSQL)

Problem: You can only query a field up to 64 characters.

Solution: Use CAML and query for items directly.

Answer 4

Problem: You want to base a content type on another content type.

Solution: Specify an ID which is 200 hex characters long.