NOTE : This article was published on EndUserSharePoint.com a couple of weeks ago and because of the wonderful feedback I received, I decided to cross-post it here too.

This is the sixth article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we will store the subscribers’ contacts. In Part 2, I configured the ‘Contact’ content type, created a subscription form for the mailing list and did some simple customizations to it. In Part 3, I utilized the thrilling DataFormWebPart to further extend and enhance the subscription form to meet the project requirements. In Part 4, I implemented requirement # 3 by creating a list that comprises the names of all the countries of the world and a lookup field that gets its values from this list. In Part 5, I showed you how to create the primary and secondary SharePoint Designer Workflows needed to meet our project requirements.

In the previous article, I showed you how to connect the approved contacts to Outlook by creating a workflow that is triggered when the list administrator approves a subscriber request moving their contact to the “Approved Subscribers” list. I have also provided you with some excellent resources if you need to know more about SharePoint Designer Workflows.

As I mentioned in Part 4, most of the questions that I have received lately focused on the sixth requirement. For easier reference, I have copied it below.

“List administrators should be able to send e-mails to all the approved and registered users specifying some filters. For instance, the list administrator should be capable of sending e-mails to all the registered users from Canada”.

In this article, I will show you how to implement this requirement using Microsoft Word Mail Merge.

Unexpectedly, Microsoft Word has no option to pick a SharePoint list directly as the data source for a mail merge. However, we can work around this limitation by connecting our “Approved Subscribers” list to Outlook and selecting the Merge data source to be an Outlook Contacts List as shown in the following figures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summary

There you go! Yes, we are done; you can now create and administer your own mailing list for your SharePoint site or blog.

Since this series is intended to be educational, you should now be capable of:

1. Creating and configuring SharePoint Lists using SharePoint Designer.
2. Configuring anonymous contributions for SharePoint Lists.
3. Creating simple SharePoint Designer workflows for sending confirmation mails to list subscribers.
4. Configuring content approval for share point lists.
5. Creating custom SharePoint list forms.
6. Creating Client-Side validation for SharePoint list forms.
7. Using the DataFormWebPart.
8. Connecting SharePoint Lists to outlook.
9. Using Word 2007 Mail Merge feature with SharePoint Lists.
10. Using and creating SharePoint List Templates.
11. Hiding SharePoint lists.
12. Using lookup columns in SharePoint lists.

Again, I would like to thank everybody who took time to drop me an e-mail, follow me on twitter, or even leave me a comment. Your feedback, guys has always made my day.

So until I talk to you again (most probably about SharePoint 2010 ), check out my blog athttp://www.aymanelhattab.com , where you will find shorter articles, tips and tricks, questions and answers, and downloadable content. You can also follow me on Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/aymanelhattab  or drop me an e-mail at ayman.elhattab@gmail.com if you have any questions.

About EndUserSharePoint:

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to providing content to SharePoint End Users on three levels: Information Worker, Power User/Site Administrator and Site Collection Administrator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE : This article was published on EndUserSharePoint.com a couple of weeks ago and because of the wonderful feedback I received, I decided to cross-post it here too.

This is the fourth article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we will store the subscribers’ contacts. In Part 2, I configured the ‘Contact’ content type, created a subscription form for the mailing list and did some simple customizations to it. In Part 3, I utilized the thrilling DataFormWebPart to further extend and enhance the subscription form to meet the project requirements.

In the previous article, I promised to tackle a new area, which is “SharePoint Designer Workflows”. However, while writing the promised article, I received some e-mails, from followers of this series, asking about the country lookup feature I mentioned in the project requirements.

“When filling out the form, users should select their countries from a drop down list, which holds all the countries of the world.”

I found a zillion of articles throughout the web covering the “lookup fields” and “lookup lists” topics into enough depth and listing their gotchas and limitations. However, I will provide you with some steps, tips, and free stuff that you will definitely need to implement this requirement. To make this article more useful, I will also explain some other topics during the implementation like List Templates and SharePoint field type conversions. I’ll show you how to modify the FormField Controls and how to mark a list as invisible using SharePoint Designer.

1. Navigate to SPCountries Feature page at CodePlex and download the Countries List Template as shown below:

Note: Do not forget to allow anonymous access to this list as I showed you in the first article.

4. Now, you need to change the “Country/Region” field type to “Lookup (information already on this site)” rather than “Single line of text” to gets its values from the “Countries” list you just created.

5. Navigate to the Contact content type settings page from the list settings one.

6.  Oops! You cannot modify the “Country/Region” field to be a lookup one! Yes, this is not supported by design, for a list of supported SharePoint field type conversions, refer to this article.

Note: You can write a simple script that utilizes SharePoint/Office Live javascript API to perform this conversion, refer to this interesting article for more information.

7 . For the sake of simplicity, I will just delete the default “Country/Region” column and replace it with a new lookup one as shown below.

8.  To mark the “Countries” lookup list as invisible (Only the list and not the included content, which should be available to all the site users including anonymous ones), open up SharePoint Designer, supply your credentials, and follow the steps illustrated by the following figures.

9. Open the custom subscription form. Unsurprisingly, you will get an error like the one shown below.

10. The reason I have received this error is that I’ve modified the list fields and some form fields are still looking at the deleted country field. To fix this error, modify the FieldName attribute values of the FormField and FieldDescription controls to be “Country” instead of “WorkCountry” or you can just useFind and Replace to achieve the same result.

11. Save your form, the error is gone

12. Preview your form from the browser and there you go; now you have a list with a form analogous to the one I have shown you in the introductory article… Congratulations!

Community Feedback

Since the kick-off of this series, I have received amazing feedback from EUSP visitors and my blog followers. I would like to extend a special thank-you to everyone who took time to drop me an e-mail, follow me on twitter, or even leave me a comment. Your feedback means a lot to me.

I noticed that most of the questions that I have received lately focused on the sixth requirement. For easier reference, I have copied it below.

“List administrators should be able to send e-mails to all the approved and registered users specifying some filters. For instance, the list administrator should be capable of sending e-mails to all the registered users from Canada”.

Starting with the next article, I will explain how to implement this requirement, which will involve the creation of primary and secondary workflows, integrate SharePoint lists with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word 2007.

As I told you in the beginning of this article, I had already started writing about SharePoint Designer Workflows before I received questions about the lookup fields and lists. When I was doing a research to avoid writing what has already been written, and to elaborate where others are vague or incomplete, I stumbled upon a great article by Paul Galvin titled “Email and SharePoint Designer Workflow”  which provides a deep explanation to what I was about to cover.

Therefore, if you are new to SharePoint Designer workflows, I would encourage you to have a look at this article. So you’ll be ready for my next post which will directly start creating and implementing the needed workflows without discussing what was smartly discussed by Paul as I am not a fan of reinventing the wheel.

So until I talk to you again, check out my blog at http://www.aymanelhattab.com , where you will find shorter articles, tips and tricks, questions and answers, and downloadable content. You can also follow me on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/aymanelhattab  or drop me an e-mail atayman.elhattab@gmail.com if you have any questions.

About EndUserSharePoint:

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to providing content to SharePoint End Users on three levels: Information Worker, Power User/Site Administrator and Site Collection Administrator.

 

NOTE : This article was published on EndUserSharePoint.com a couple of weeks ago and because of the wonderful feedback I received, I decided to cross-post it here too.

This is the third article in a multipart series that is intended to help you creating mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I have listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we will store the subscribers’ contacts. In Part 2, I have configured the ‘Contact’ content type, created a subscription form for the mailing list and did some simple customizations to it.

In this article, I will customize the subscription form I created in the previous article, utilize the magical DataFormWebPart to remove the unneeded columns, and change the form validation to be client sided rather than the default server-sided validation.

I will also show you how to validate the email addresses entered by the subscribers using regular expressions and, at the end, I will thrash out a trick to enable the DataFormWebPart to be viewed by anonymous users.

Let’s get started!

1. In the Design view, click the default List Form Web Part to select it. From the Code View, put the cursor straight away before the ListFormWebPart and press enter.

 

2.  On the Insert menu, point to SharePoint Controls, and then click Custom List Form.

 

3. The List or Document Library Form dialog box opens up.

3.1. In the List or document library to use for form list, choose the list where we store our subscribers’ contacts.

3.2. In the Content type to use for form list, choose the ‘contact’ content type.

3.3. Under Type of form to create, click the ‘New item form’ as shown in the figure below.

 

3.4. The custom list form can comprise a toolbar to assist users in carrying out frequent actions for an item. The commands on the toolbar vary according to the type of the form. For example, the toolbar for the New Item Form looks like the following one.

As you can see, we do not need this toolbar in our subscription form so do not check the show standard toolbar checkbox.

4.  Now, the custom list form (Data Form Web Part) has been added to your subscription form. The custom list form shows the default fields for the selected form type, along with any default controls for each field. You can utilize the WYSIWYG tools in SharePoint Designer to add or eliminate columns, modify font formatting, or apply colors. When you do this, Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)  is directly inserted into the HTML. Although it is possible to amend the XSL directly in Code view, you can make use of the formatting tools in Design view to apply XSL without studying any XSL.

1. 4.1. Remove all the unwanted fields from the form by removing the whole unwanted rows.

   4.2. Rename ‘Country/Region’ to be only ‘Country’.

   4.3. Change the font formatting, or apply the colors that go with your site’s theme.

   4.4. Remove the Ok and Cancel buttons at the top of the DataFormWebPart. We need them only once on our form.

As you can see the DataFormWebPart is incredibly cool. Within the XSL, you can input any HTML you want and, in effect, the sky is really the limit.

5. Now, you must hide the default List Form Web Part. Right-click the default List Form Web Part and then click Web Part Properties.

In the dialog box that appears, click the plus sign next to Layout, select the Hidden check box, and then click OK.

 

Note:  Do not delete the default List Form Web Part. This will break the page’s connection to the list.

6.  Next step is validating the users’ inputs. For instance, we need to make sure that the user has entered their e-mail address in a correct format since we are going to send them e-mails later.

6.1. Find the E-mail Address form field, right click on it in the designer, and click Show Common Control Tasks.

6.2. Change the “Format As” dropdown from “List Form Field” to “Text Box” as shown below.

 

6.3. Now drop a RegularExpressionValidator control from the asp.net controls toolbox beside the E-mail address text box as shown beneath.

 

 

6.4. Specify the RegularExpressionValidator control properties (such as ControlToValidate, ErrorMessage, Validate Expression) from the Tag Properties toolbar.

 

For ControlToValidate, choose the ID of the E-mail address field and for the ValidationExpression, choose Internet E-mail Address.

 

6.5. After specifying the control properties, you will end up with something like the following markup in the SharePoint Designer Code View.

That’s it! You now have custom client-sided validation on your form. You can also make use of the asp.net RequiredFieldValidator controls in the same way discussed in the previous step to make sure that the user has not left the text boxes empty.

7.     In addition, you can modify the markup of your form however you want. For instance, you can substitute the SharePoint:SaveButton control with a traditional asp.net button that calls some custom java script to do custom logic and save the item to the backend. I will leave this point to another discussion.

Didn’t I tell you? The DataFormWebPart is an incredibly wonderful creature.

For me, I have ended up with the one shown below.

 

8. Save your changes and navigate to the subscription form anonymously. You will receive an error message like the one shown below.

9 . I have blogged about this error on my blog a couple of weeks ago. For now, just set DataSourceMode of SPDataSource control to Webs or ListOfLists. This will permit anonymous users to view the DataFormWebPart that holds the subscription form fields

10. Congratulations! You are now ready to preview the page in the browser.

Summary

One of the initiatives of this series of articles is to show you how powerful and flexible the Data Form Web Part is. In this article, we have only scratched the surface; there are still a lot of cool and nifty features when it comes to the magical Data Form Web Part. Laura Rogers has really done a great job discussing and discovering wonderful features in the Data Form Web Part. I would advise you to have a look at her articlesat EndUserSharePoint.com for more tips and tricks.

In my next article I will go into some completely new stuff when we explore SharePoint Designer Workflows. I will create a workflow that sends welcome e-mails to the list subscribers as soon as their requests to join the list are approved. And as we agreed in the introductory part, I will not write a single line of code.

 

About EndUserSharePoint:

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to providing content to SharePoint End Users on three levels: Information Worker, Power User/Site Administrator and Site Collection Administrator.

 

NOTE : This article was published on EndUserSharePoint.com a couple of weeks ago and because of the wonderful feedback I received, I decided to cross-post it here too.

This is the second article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we store the subscribers’ contacts. In this article, we will continue our journey, let’s carry on!

In the previous article, I made use of the ‘Contacts’ list template, provided out-of-the-box by SharePoint, to create a list which will act as the backend for our mailing list. In this article, I will show you how to configure the ‘Contact’ content type, create a custom subscription form and do some sort of customization. The intention of these customizations is not only to make the subscription form look different from the out-of-the-box list forms but also to show you the power, simplicity, and efficiency of SharePoint Designer 2007.

1. Navigate to the list settings page > Advanced settings.

2. Make sure that management of content types is turned on

3. Navigate to the contact content type settings page from the list settings as shown underneath:

4. Configure the content type fields from the content type settings page. We need a  list subscriber to mandatorily supply their first name, last name and e-mail address and optionally supply theirCompany, City and Country.

5. Now, navigate to the New Form (NewForm.aspx) by adding a new contact to the list as follows :

6.As shown in the figure above we need to get rid of the highlighted areas. I will show you in this article, and the next one how, to accomplish that.

7. Open up SharePoint Designer, connect to your SharePoint site collection, and supply your credentials.

8.Choose the list that we created in the previous article from the folder list. If the Folder List is not visible, on the View menu, click Folder List.

9.Make a copy from the NewForm.aspx and rename the copied version from NewForm_copy(1).aspx to subscribe.aspx as follows:

10. Change the list New item form from NewForm.aspx to subscribe.aspx using the supporting files tab of the list properties’ dialogue box as illustrated below:

11.Now choosing to add a new contact to the list will redirect you to subscribe.aspx rather than NewForm.aspx.

12.Our next task is to modify the newly created form (subscribe.aspx) to look like a mailing list subscription form rather than the traditional SharePoint list forms.

13.Open subscribe.aspx using SharePoint designer.

14.Select “New Item” highlighted in the figure below. Delete it with the colon preceding it.

15.    Now, we need to eliminate the “New Item” from the form breadcrumb.

15.1. Select the “PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb” placeholder from the Master Page toolbar as shown in the figure below.

 

Note:  You can show this toolbar if it is hidden from View menu > Toolbars.

15.2. The word (Master) on the content placeholder tab means that the content is retrieved from the master page. To make this content region editable to override the retrieved data, click the arrow in the upper-right corner to show the Common Content Tasks list, and then click Create Custom Content as shown in the figure below. This will automatically create a new content region that will fill the placeholder in this page rather than using the Master’s default content.

 

15.3. Replace the SiteMapPath control with a link to the site collection’s welcome page. You can use the handy “SPLinkButton” control in conjunction with “ProjectProperty” control to accomplish that as shown below. The  good thing about SPLinkButton is that it is aware of ~site and ~sitecollection expression tokens.

 

 

16. To change the page title “IE Tab title”, locate the ”PlaceHolderPageTitle” placeholder using the Master Page toolbar discussed above and replace the ListFormPageTitle control with your own title.

 

 

17 . Now, we are in a good shape; only one non-compulsory step is left which is adding the left navigation bar back to the page. Note the word (Custom) on the content placeholder tab. This means that the content is custom content for this page only, and that it is not retrieved from the attached master page. Nevertheless, we do not need any custom content for this page. We need to retrieve the left navigation menu from the master page so the only thing we need to do is defaulting the region to the master’s content using the Common Content Tasks as shown in the figure below.

 

18.  Save your changes by clicking Save on the File menu. A message appears warning you that saving your changes will customize a page from the site definition. Click Yes.

 

19. And here is what you will end up with, if you follow the preceding steps.

 

Note: If you are not pleased with the customizations that you have made to the page, you can always reset it to the site definition.

Summary:

In this article, I showed you how to configure the ‘Contact’ list content type, create a subscription form for the mailing list, make it the default New Item Form and do some simple customizations to it.

In the next article, I will show you how to customize the form fields, use the extremely powerful DataFormWebPart, change the form validation mechanism to be client sided, add your own validation logic, configure the SPDataSource control and much more ..

About EndUserSharePoint:

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to providing content to SharePoint End Users on three levels: Information Worker, Power User/Site Administrator and Site Collection Administrator.

Using a web service and a little magic, it’s possible to create your own data view web part “dashboard” to quickly get to permissions and other screens for all of the lists and libraries on your SharePoint site.  Here’s an example of what the goal is:

 

This is really a Very cool read for SharePoint! Lot of folks asking how to do this and Laura Rogers has done a fantastic job showing you how. Here is a link to the full article !