concept SharePoint Designer in category sharePoint

This is an excerpt from Manning's book SharePoint 2010 Site Owner's Manual: Flexible Collaboration without Programming. Login to get full access to this book.

SharePoint Designer—SharePoint Designer (which is free) allows you to easily build no-code solutions to automate business processes through workflow tools, enhanced page-modification capabilities, and ease of access to external data.

In the last chapter we discussed functionality that you can use to create business intelligence sites. This chapter begins our section on composite sites and shows how you can build powerful applications using SharePoint Designer. The scenario that you’re going to implement, following a step-by-step process, is automating the review process for tracking employees and their certification status. To begin, we’ll discuss the scenario you’ve been given and how you’ll create the solution utilizing SharePoint. Throughout this chapter I’ll be referencing SharePoint Designer by its commonly used acronym, SPD.

Figure 8.4. SharePoint Designer 2010 has changed a lot since 2007. The numbered callouts correspond to the following explanations of what you can do functionality-wise in each of those sections.

This is an excerpt from Manning's book SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

BCS is the evolution of the SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC), which allows you to connect to external data sources such as databases or web services. Data sources can be visualized in an External List, which looks and acts like a standard SharePoint list for the user but the data still resides in the connected system. SharePoint Designer 2010 is the tool to use when creating external entities and mapping them to external data sources. In SharePoint 2007, BDC was an Enterprise feature but, in SharePoint 2010, a part of the BCS is available in the SharePoint 2010 Foundation edition.

Before SharePoint Designer, Microsoft had an application called Microsoft FrontPage that you could use to edit and create web pages. FrontPage acted as an editing client to SharePoint 2003, using extensions to IIS called FrontPage Server Extensions.

FrontPage received criticism for creating invalid HTML markup and for changing the HTML without telling you. When Microsoft released SharePoint Designer 2007, it discontinued the FrontPage product.

SharePoint Designer 2010 is a free and downloadable application that can be used to customize and control SharePoint 2010. Using SharePoint Designer, you can create new items such as sites, lists, and content types. You can also edit and configure these items as well as change the layout of pages and edit the master pages. SharePoint Designer can do everything that you do using the web interface and more. For example, using SharePoint Designer, you can create external content types and connect to the external data; you can’t do this using the web interface.

You have to use SharePoint Designer 2010 if you’re going to use the Data Form Web Part or customize list views using the XSLT List View Web Part. These two Web Parts are powerful and require a far more advanced user interface than the one available in SharePoint.

SharePoint Designer 2010 can only be used for editing SharePoint 2010 sites, and SharePoint Designer 2007 can’t be used with SharePoint 2010. If you need to work with SharePoint 2007, you have to use SharePoint Designer 2007.

2.6.2. Adding a Web Part using SharePoint Designer 2010

To add a Web Part to a page using SharePoint Designer, you have to open the site with the application. This can be done using one of two methods:

Figure 2.11. When you edit a page in SharePoint Designer, the Ribbon adapts to the editing context and makes the Insert tab visible. The Insert tab gives you access to the Web Part button, which is used to insert new Web Parts.

This is an excerpt from Manning's book SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

SharePoint Designer is a powerful tool that can be used to customize SharePoint sites. Many of its unique capabilities are used to change the look and feel (brand) of a site, create, add, and move web parts, and bring list data and external data onto SharePoint pages. You can do a great deal in SharePoint Designer including building workflows.

Building workflows with SharePoint Designer is a popular and widely used approach. The tool is easy to use because it provides the user with a wizard-like experience (figure 1.12) that is more familiar than the Visual Studio’s code editor.

Figure 1.12. The SharePoint Designer workflow engine provides a rich suite of customizations for workflows, allowing you to easily meet unique and sometimes complex workflow requirements

SharePoint Designer isn’t a tool for the average end user, however. Microsoft would categorize the tool in the power users group—people who are not programmers but who are savvy enough to be proficient with other Microsoft Office tools like Excel and Access. Using SharePoint Designer is unlike using the browser, where things are simpler and more intuitive. This book will cover SharePoint Designer workflows in much greater depth in chapters 3, 4, and 5.

Figure 1.18. Visual Studio 2010 comes with a new ability to import a workflow created in SharePoint Designer.

You would typically first create a workflow in SharePoint Designer because it’s such an easy tool to use. After a year, you might realize that your business requirements have become more complicated, necessitating a Visual Studio workflow. In SharePoint 2007, you would have had to recreate the SharePoint Designer workflow from scratch within Visual Studio. Now, thanks to the new export and import functionality, you won’t lose the valuable man-hours it took to build the Designer workflow in the first place.

This is an excerpt from Manning's book SharePoint 2007: Developer’s Guide to Business Data Catalog. Login to get full access to this book.

Group Using Restricted Account —Choose this option if you’re going to use a group such as DOMAINNAME\Domain Users, so that all users will be able to access the database via SSO. The group name will still access the database with a specific user account. This option uses a different API than the other two options to access the database. It’s worth noting that SharePoint Designer and Excel Services don’t support this option.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition (MOSS) ships with numerous Business Data Web Parts that enable us to display business data in various formats, and provide an interface to the entity actions. In chapter 2 of this book, we learned how to configure entities, associations, actions, and filters. This is where all of that stuff comes into play! The most commonly used web part from the Business Data Catalog Web Parts is the Business Data List, which displays business data in a data grid format. Others include web parts that display data in a columnar format (one row at a time). Also included are web parts specific to Profile pages, which we’ll be discussing in this chapter. One of the most versatile web parts is the Data Form Web Part that ships with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. We’ll use this web part to connect to our business data, as it allows for more customization than the Business Data List Web Part. In this chapter, we’ll explore all of the Business Data Catalog Web Parts that come with MOSS Enterprise, and we’ll explore the Data Form Web Part in SharePoint Designer. First, let’s explore the purpose of the out-of-the-box web parts.

Figure 4.14. The Format Number dialog box, which can be used to format column values in SharePoint Designer for the BDC List Web Part

4.2. Using SharePoint Designer with the Business Data List Web Part

The Business Data Catalog Web Parts look a little plain out of the box. Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer or XSL, you can pimp them up a bit and end up with a good-looking web part that also provides more functionality than the standard BDC Web Parts. The nice thing about Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is that it generates XSL for you while you point and click your way to a nice-looking web part. Occasionally, you’ll find you just can’t achieve what you want to using SharePoint Designer, so we like to use SharePoint Designer first, then tweak the web part using XSL.