Scenario
A list serves as the master list and has a look-up column that is linked to a second list, containing details for a chosen item. In the master list we want to show the title of the item. Easy enough, a SharePoint out-of-the-box capability. Now the tricky part is, that the details list, in turn, contains a look-up column that links to the master list. When an item in the master list is created or updated, the look-up column in the details list should be updated and the created/updated item(s) should be set through a workflow.

Solution
Look-up columns can be updated through a workflow like any other column in SharePoint. What makes it special is the format though. As any column of the type look-up (i.e. Person field) it requires a certain format, containing the linked item’s ID and the value you specified when configuring the look-up column. So, when you create the required string for the update, just follow these formats:

• Update the field with a single item: {ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE}
• Update the field with two items: {ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE};#{ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE}
• Update the field with 3+ items: {ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE};#{ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE};#{ITEM ID};#{ITEMVALUE}

http://www.osn.ch/blog/2013/04/03/sharepoint-ohne-competence-center-ist-wie-ein-porsche-ohne-motor/

So, here I present you an easy and pretty straight forward no-code solution for multilingual InfoPath forms. Note that the blog post was done using SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2013, but works the same way in SharePoint 2013. I just didn’t have my 2013 VM with me at the time of writing.

There is two components we need. The form itself and a SharePoint list, which will hold all our field labels in various languages.

The Form Labels list:

1. Create a list using the Custom List template in the SharePoint site you want to host the form in;

   

2. We will need 3 columns in that list, so go into the list settings (or do it through the ribbon bar) and create them as outlined below:
   1. Label ID: Single Line of Text; Mandatory (I used the Title column and renamed it);

      This will hold the labels ID, not the value we want to display for each language. So if we have a field in our form called “First Name” or “Vorname” in German, the label ID will be “FirstName”.

   2. Language: Choice; Drop Down; Mandatory; Values are the languages you want to provide (for this example I used “English” and “German”);

      This will allow us to tell the form which language the label text is in. We will us it later to filter the value in our form.

   3. Label Text: Single Line of Text; Mandatory.

   This is the actual text of the label. So if the label for “FirstName” should be in German, the label text value will be “Vorname”

   Your list of columns should look like this:

   

3. Now we will pre-fill the list with data. For our scenario we are planning with 3 fields in our form which are First Name, City and Date and Time. Go to your list and create a new item. You should see the following input mask:

   

4. For the label “First Name” put in the following values:
   1. Label ID: FirstName
   2. Language: English
   3. Label Text: First Name
5. At this stage we have the English label defined. For the German label repeat step 3-4 with the following values:
   1. Label ID: FirstName
   2. Language: German
   3. Label Text: Vorname
6. Ok, since the form will only cater for 2 languages, we are done with the FirstName label. Now repeat steps 3-5 for the labels City and DateTime (German values are Stadt for City and Datum und Uhrzeit for Date and Time). When you are done, the list will look like so:

   

   For a form that will support 4 languages you would have 4 entries per label ID, for 5 languages 5 entries and so on.

Alright, the first part is done. Easy, wasn’t it? No line of code so far and all through the UI. Now, let’s get started with the form.

Fire up InfoPath, 2010 or 2013, doesn’t make a difference when you work with SharePoint 2010. I will be using SharePoint 2010 in my example, but I will design the form in InfoPath 2013. Create a new browser base form and we can get started.

1. Insert a 2×4 table underneath the title area and drop a Drop Down (Language Selection), a Text Field (First Name), another Drop Down (City Selection) and a Date/Time (Date and Time) control into that table, so it looks like the example below and make sure you name your fields accordingly in the form data section. The sequence of the fields on the form data section mirrors the sequence of the controls in the table.

   

2. Next, we will configure the language selector. Right-click on the first drop down in your table and select Drop-Down List Box Properties. Add two entries to the list of list box choices; English and German. Make the English selection the default and remove the default “Select…” option.

   

3. Click OK and return to your form. In the cells left of each box, insert a Calculated Value control, except for the first line. Those controls will be used for our labels. When you add them you will be asked to provide an XPath expression. Leave this part empty for now and click OK. Your form will look like so:

   

4. At this stage, we have our list that holds the label information and a form with is basic structure. Now we need to connect the list to the form and then configure the Calculated Value controls to show the label text according to what was selected in the language drop down at the top of the form.
5. Now go to the Data tab in the ribbon and select the From SharePoint List option. We are now going to hook up the list to the form. Follow the wizard, make sure that you select the Form Labels list in the second screen. On the next screen you will have the option to select fields that you want to use in the form. Make sure you select the fields shown in the screenshot:

   

6. Click Next, Next and Finish.

Ok, so now we have the list connected to the form, but how does that make our form multilingual? So here are the final steps to make your form a multilingual form.

1. Right-click on the first Calculated Value control and select Calculated Value Properties
2. Click on the formula button
3. Select Insert Field or Group
4. In the Select a Field or Group window change from the Main data source to your list data source. In my example the data source is called FormLabels

   

5. Drill down into the dataFields group and select the Label Text field

   

6. Then click on Filter Data
7. At this stage, the data source would return all the Label Text fields from our list but only display the first one that we put in. We now want to filter the result set from our list by telling it which language we need and which label. The label ID we’ll have to hardcode, which is fine. This usually doesn’t change at all. For the language, we want it to be dynamic, so we will use the language drop down’s value for our filter.
8. In the Filter Data dialog click Add to create a new filter
9. For the first part of the filter rule, select the field Label and the condition will be “Label is equal to FirstName”. FirstName is the value of our label ID and since we want the first label to be the FirstName label, we tell it the corresponding label ID. So type in FirstName

   

10. Then click on And to add another condition to the rule
11. Select Language from the list field options, is equal to as the condition and in the third field choose Select Field or Group

    

12. In the Select Field or Group dialog change back to your main data source and select the Language field

    

13. Click OK and make sure your rule looks like the screenshot below

    

14. Click OK until all the dialog windows are all closed
15. Now repeat step 1-14 for the other two Calculate Value controls. In step 9 make sure you replace the label ID with the corresponding field’s label ID (City for the City label and DateTime for the Date and Time label) Ea. “Label is equal to City”
    

Done. Our form should be working now. Let’s test it. Hit F5 or click on the preview button in InfoPath. It should load with the English labels as English is our default value in the language drop down.

Now select German from the language drop down and the labels will change to German.

All done and working. And all that without a single line of code, just using SharePoint standards. As said before, the same principle applies to InfoPath 2010, 2013 and SharePoint 2010, 2013 as well as InfoPath Filler forms. If you want to use InfoPath web based forms, which we did in this example, you will require the Enterprise features of SharePoint. One more thing, the values of drop down controls are still in English in our example, but the same rules based filtering can be applied to the drop down values. Just make sure you maintain those values in a SharePoint list. The administration of the labels and drop down values will be so much easier and you won’t ever have to touch the form again

Read more about it in Nintex’ news release.

Last week SharePoint 2013 RTM was released on MSDN and I had to install it straight away. One of the reasons was a presentation I had on Project Management in SharePoint on Friday. For that I wanted to use SharePoint 2013 RTM instead of the Preview version. Just because it has all the icons

So after I installed SP2013 I created a site collection based on the “Project Site” template. This is a new site template and After the nice little “Working on it – This shouldn’t take too long” had disappeared (Yes, Microsoft teaches its software manners now ) a sleek looking SharePoint site appeared.

The first thing you will notice is that the template contains a nice little web part at the top, the “Timeline” web part. Many of you will remember this from MS Project 2010 where you can drag tasks into a timeline view. Great feature if you intend to show your milestones in some sort of graphic. Now, this feature has come to join the party in SharePoint 2013. Each project site template has the Timeline web part at the top of the page and you can use it to display important tasks in a nice little overview graph. The data for this web part normally comes from a task list, but can also come from another web part on the same page.

In the Project Site template, the Timeline web part is connected to the task list within the site. When you click on the “Edit” link of the Timeline web part, SharePoint redirects you to the task list page, which consists of the Time line web part at the top and a task list entry mask at the bottom of the page.

Now this is the next great feature. You can now start putting your tasks into the task list. Straight from the page you are on. If you need additional columns from the task list, simply click on the “+” at the top of the task list input mask.

After we put in our first task and click on “Stop” to stop editing the task list, the new task automatically gets added to the Timeline web part. (NOTE: this only happens automatically for the first task)

Great to easily fill in your task list and update the Timeline web part in one go. If you now switch back to the home page you will notice that the Timeline web part is already up-to-date with the new task. Also when you click on the web part you will get a tab in the ribbon bar to customise your web part and the shown task. Click on your task for example and it will not only show you the task details, but it will also let you remove it from the timeline. And to top it all off…you can drag and drop it anywhere within the Timeline web part. Awesome to reorder your tasks if you have a lot of them to show on your timeline.

As a next step, let’s go and click on “edit this list” again. This will bring you back to the previous screen where you can edit your tasks. Just before, we only added a single, simple task. Now, let’s assume we are project managers and we want to manage our fairly basic project just within SharePoint. A recent comment from a client was “I don’t want to manage my project in SharePoint. There is no easy way of moving my tasks around or even create an initial high-level project plan with summary tasks”. After my demo on Friday his comment was “This is great, when can we have that?” You will see why.

In your task list, add a few more tasks as I did in the screenshot below.

Now, if you are still in edit mode, have a look at the ribbon bar (by default, SharePoint does not expand the ribbon bar anymore, which I find quite nice, not having to change to “Browse” and hide the bar every time I click on an object). Click on the “Tasks” tab and you will find two sections that are really and truly awesome for basic project management. It is almost like working with MS Project

The first section “Hierarchy” lets you easily move tasks around, indent and outdent tasks as well as expand and minimise subtasks. You can create as many summary tasks as you want now, just like I did below. I grouped the tasks for my project phases under summary tasks. I move the “My first phase of the project” task to the top and the “My second phase of the project task” to the fourth position in the list by using “Move Up”. Finally I finished my project planning by indenting the project tasks under each phase.

Now, rather than having my tasks on the timeline, I want to only have my project phases on my timeline. So I click on the task in the timeline and select “Remove from Timeline” in the timeline tab. Then I select my two summary tasks in the list (just select them by clicking next to the checkboxes) and finish off by clicking on “Add to Timeline” in the task tab. The timeline now looks like this:

This is great news for everyone who wishes to have some of the basic task scheduling capabilities of MS Project, but is not allowed to use MS Project or might be overwhelmed by the features it offers. For those who prefer the best of both worlds, you can, like you can in SP2010, link the task list to MS Project and work out of MS Project while your team members still use SP2013 to update their tasks. And if your team members prefer Outlook, they can use Outlook to work with their tasks and update them from within a familiar interface.

Now last but not least, a nice little gimmick. Go back to your home screen and have a look at the timeline web part. You will notice that it switches between the timeline view and a summary of upcoming tasks.

Summary
The Project Site template is far from what someone who worked with Project Server might would expect. But having said that, everyone who requires basic project management and task scheduling capabilities with (or without) integration with MS Project will be wowed by the nice little features SharePoint 2013′s project site template offers. I have to say, great work Microsoft!! I was really blown away by the new features and I am sure others (like my client) will be, too. Having all those options without having to use Project Server (which in most project management cases is a bit of an overkill…) will be greatly taken up by customers.

So what can you do to get the members of a group and then send each of them an email? Easy enough since SharePoint provides a web method as part of the UserGroup.asmx web service. Then we package that up in a UDA and everyone can use it without the hassle of implementing it over and over again. Note that the logic of the UDA can also be implemented in Nintex Workflow 2007, it just can’t be wrapped into a UDA.

How does it work?
The workflow within the UDA consists of 2 parts

First we call the UserGroup (http://[SITEURL]/_vti_bin/usergroup.asmx) web service and use its GetUserCollectionFromGroup web method, which will bring back an XML with information about every user in the specified SharePoint group.

The XML looks something like this:

1
2
3

         .
         .
         .

Next we use the “Query XML” action to extract the users’ ID and put them in a collection. The query will look like that:

/xml/defaultNS:GetUserCollectionFromGroup/defaultNS:Users/defaultNS:User/@LoginName

Note the “xml” node at the start. This is because I selected “Force top level XML node” in the “Call web service” action. You can find that option under “Store result in” when you expand the “Result processing” option.

That is all we do. Of course you can query any of the other properties too. The returned properties for each user are:

• User ID
  
• Sid
  
• Name
  
• LoginName
  
• Email
  
• Notes
  
• IsSiteAdmin
  
• IsDomainGroup
  

How do I use the UDA?
Drop the UDA into the right spot within your workflow logic. The UDA requires only one input parameter:

• Group Name – provide the name for the group you want to get the members from

In return the UDA will spit out a collection of all the IDs of all the users in the group:

• Users – collection in the following format: DOMAIN\USERID1; DOMAIN\USERID2; DOMAIN\USERID3;
  

In the event of an error within the UDA (connection issues, group already exists, etc.) there are 2 additional output parameters:

• Error Message – The message returned by the web service that errored
• Error Occurrence – Indicates that an error occurred within the UDA

Using the output parameters will help you to handle the exception appropriately within your workflow.

The web service in the UDA uses a workflow constant (Site Collection Level) called “SharePoint Web Service Account” of the type credential. You will have to create this constant before you can use the UDA as it currently stands. The account will have to be able to read web services across the site collection, so read only access to all sites for this account will be fine.

Alternatively you can modify the UDA in a way that the credentials are passed to the UDA as part of the input parameters.

What’s next? After the UDA you simply drop in a “For each” action and a “Send notification” action. That is it. The workflow should now have a section as shown below.

Now we need to configure the actions.

• Get SharePoint Group Members UDA:
  • Group Name: provide the name of the group you want to get the members from;
  • Error Message: create a variable “ErrorMessage” of type Multiple lines of text for this;
  • Error Occurred: create a variable “IsError” of type Yes/No for this;
  • Users: create a variable “UserIDCollection” of type Collection for this;
• For each:
  • Target Collection: Select the “UserIDCollection” variable;
  • Store result in: Create a variable “tempUserID” for this option; and
  • We don’t need to configure the last 2 options.
• Send notification:
  • Use the “tempUserID” as the variable in the “To” field; and
  • Customise the rest of the action as you wish.

So what does that have to do with personalised notifications? Well, within the “For each” action, just before the “Send notification” action you can use the variable “tempUserID” to get personlised information about the current user. For example you could query the user profile to get his/her name, address, phone number, etc. BUT, this I will leave up to you, but I think you can see now what my client was trying to do J

Download
Get SharePoint Group Members – UDA and NWF files

With SharePoint 2013 around the corner, I was really looking forward to some enhancements to InfoPath 2013. So what is new in InfoPath 2013 compared to InfoPath 2010? At a first glimpse, NOTHING. Very disappointing I have to say. Let us step through InfoPath.

When you open up InfoPath it starts at the New tab of the backstage view. You will notice that the templates here haven’t changed. Same old here. What you might already see here is that the look and feel has changed compared to the last version. Not a biggy in my opinion.

Let’s select a blank form as our template and have a look at the actual designer:

• User Interface – same old, just new design
• Working with fonts, tables, etc. – same old
• Controls – same old. No new controls and no additional functionality for any of the controls (at least I haven’t found any yet). I would have loved to at least be able to put rules onto one of  the most commonly used controls, the Person/Group Picker.
• Rules – same old. Would have loved to at least see the ability to copy and paste rules from one form to another, not just within a form
• The Insert tab – One little change here, you now have an explicit way of inserting Online Pictures (which by the way is the new “Clip Arts”. The functionality itself was and still is there as part of the Picture control. Picture control and Online Picture are really the same thing. Opening that dialog will let you search Office.com or Bing for pictures.
• Page Design tab –  same old. Would have loved to see the ability to easily create your own themes and use/manage them straight within InfoPath
• Data tab – same old, can’t find anything new here.
• Developer tab – still no news
• Layout – an another big NO for new features

So really the only new feature is the IDE integration with Visual Studio, which for me as a no-code solution specialist is very disappointing. In my opinion, if you have to start coding things in InfoPath, you might as well look at asp.net forms or 3rd party products such as Nintex Forms or K2 SmartForms.

Oh no, wait. One more Almost forgot about the top right of InfoPath 2013. Like in SharePoint, you can now change the account that is used by InfoPath. Very handy when you don’t want to publish your form yet, but want to test rules and views with different user accounts.

Summary
Sorry folks, but I have to disappoint you as much as MS disappointed me on the InfoPath 2013 front.

For me the question now is, due to the lack of new features, will InfoPath as a product be deprecated in the next version of Office and SharePoint? Well, I guess we will have to stay tuned and wait for the next version…unless MS adds some really nice features to the final release of InfoPath. Unlikely but one can dream

In Nintex you can create new sites, apply templates, define the URL, etc. but one thing that was always missing is the ability to create SharePoint groups for the newly created sites. Since Nintex Workflow 2010 offers UDAs (User Defined Actions), I thought it would come in quite handy to wrap this in a UDA offer it to the public. And here it is. This post explains the concept of the UDA, what is actually happening within the UDA and how to use the UDA. I provided both, the NWF file as well as the UDA file for you.

Scenario
The IT department of Company X created a self-service portal where users can go to a SharePoint list, fill in some details and after an approval they get their own Team Site. Then they would have to go into the Site Settings and modify the permissions, break the inheritance, comply with the SharePoint group naming convention, etc. A lot of things to do, if you ask me. But why not automate this process? Let the workflow do all the work for you and automatically set up a group with Full Control, one with Contribute and one with Read permissions. On top of that you can easily enforce a common naming convention for SharePoint Groups, something like “Sitename_Grouprole”.

How does it work?
Let us have a look at the workflow within the UDA, which is quite simple.

We are using two web services, which come out of the box with SharePoint. The UserGroup (http://[SITEURL]/_vti_bin/usergroup.asmx) and the Permissions (http://[SITEURL]/_vti_bin/permissions.asmx) web service. The first one lets us create a SharePoint group by using the AddGroup method. The second one lets us set the permissions within the site by using the AddPermission method.

Within the UDA we create the group first (NOTE: The group will actually be created on a site collection level). In case there was an error, the UDA skips the set permissions web service and spits out an error message, which you can handle appropriately within your workflow. If the group creation was successful, the next step is to set the permissions. The UDA allows you to specify whether the group gets read, contribute or full control. Depending on the parameter passed to the UDA, it will then set the correct permission mask.

That’s it. Simple, isn’t it? And all that with no code and just using web services which SharePoint provides already.

How do I use the UDA?
Drop the UDA into your workflow, right after the “Create site” action. The UDA requires a few input parameters:

• Group Name – provide the name for the group to be created
• Group Owner – specify who owns the group in the format DOMAIN\USERID
  
• Group Permission Level – provide one of the following values:
  • Read
  • Contribute
  • Full Control
• Site Name – the name of the site you just created
• Site URL – the URL of the site you just created. Be sure you provide it in the following format: http://[ServerURL]/site
  

In the event of an error within the UDA (connection issues, group already exists, etc.) there are 2 output parameters:

• Error Message – The message returned by the web service that errored
• Error Occurrence – Indicates that an error occurred within the UDA

Using the output parameters will help you to handle the exception appropriately within your workflow.

The web services in the UDA use a workflow constant (Site Collection Level) called “SharePoint Web Service Account” of the type credential. You will have to create this constant before you can use the UDA as it currently stands. The account will have to be able to read web services across the site collection, so read only access to all sites for this account will be fine.

Alternatively you can modify the UDA in a way that the credentials are passed to the UDA as part of the input parameters.

Downloads
Create SharePoint Group – UDA and NWF files

For now I updated the blog in terms of the look and feel a bit and I hope to provide more quality posts and updates to old posts (How To: Check if a user is part of a SharePoint group in InfoPath is the one that needs the most updates thanks to all your contributions ), so stay tuned.