But again today I am going to take a shot at getting My Sites working with Forms-Based Authentication. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that I will not destroy the setup I’ve worked so hard on already. After this I think that I need to try getting a public-facing (ie — Internet Zone) version of the windows authentication site working, because until I have this I can’t really use Sharepoint Designer to tweak the appearance of the website.
not sure why this happens, but when I exported my tables from one SQL Server to another, the script it generated didn’t seem to setup the default values for my bit fields. Is this normal? Am I normal? Is anybody?
I Know This is Not Terribly Interesting »« Well, Back to the Main Program
Okay setting up the connection to SQL Server was a real hassle for me. I just couldn’t get the permissions right. In the future, I gotta remember that when something is going wrong, it’s usually something basic. Like SQL Server permissions. I guess back in the day MS used to have things a little more open, or perhaps it was that I was always using an MS Access database to do my projects and that setup is more wide-open than other configurations. I don’t know, either way, keep it simple.
Now I’m curious to know why I can have pages compile without listing them in my web.config explicitly. Maybe it was jacking up the trust level to WSS_Medium that allowed for this? Nope, it’s not that! Maybe I will find out the answer to this question, but it might not occur to me until four or five months down the road. Until then, the mystery will haunt me. HAUNT ME!
Stupid SQL Server!!! »« What User is Doing the Mailing in CreateUserWizard.MailDefinition?
Holy jesus fuck I am sick of this error. I’ve created a signup page in my sharepoint system and I want the CreateUserWizard to send the new user an email. But for whatever reason the server is unable to open the BodyTextFile I’m pointing to. I keep seeing a 403 Forbidden error.
Who do you have to give permissions to? I just want this to work!
I gave read permissions to Everyone and it worked, so I know it will. I had to edit the web.config for the site to make the SMTP server settings available. I’ve tried <machine_name>IIS_WPG as well as <machine_name>ASPNET and NETWORK SERVICE.
None of these fucking worked
I had to just give Users permission to the folder and it works. It’s a little less wide-open than Everyone (I guess) and I removed the “read & execute” permission leaving just read and list folder contents.
Nothing I ever do will be good enough for you, bastard admin.
Well, Back to the Main Program »« Right or Wrong, This is How To Fix It
I’m not sure if this is a gaping security hole, but I think not. It will maybe increase the total surface-area of your database, because the fix is to create a SQL Server Auth-type user in your database.
But back up…what’s the error message anyway:
This control does not allow connection strings with the following keywords: ‘Integrated Security’, ‘Trusted_Connection’.
I got this message by loading up a User Control with a datagrid in it. This control was being hosted by a page that lives inside my sharepoint root. So it looks like sharepoint restricts the kinds of database access you can do. This failed attempt was using windows integrated authentication. The workaround was to create a SQL Server user and connect to the database using an System.Data.OleDb provider.
How do you make that kind of a connection string though? This stuff is tough to hunt down online. What I always do is create a new file on the desktop and name it something.udl. This file extension is a data access file. When you change the extension you’ll get a funny new icon and once you click the new file you will see a tabbed dialog box. Pick Microsoft OLE Provider for SQL and then go to the next tab and fill in the SQL Server user details, and a couple other blanks in this form. Once you’re good click the Test Connection button and see if it’s connecting. if so close the dialog and now open up the .udl file with notepad. It’s basically a comment line and a connection string that will work in your aspnet application.
Like I said, I’m not sure any of this is truly advisable, but this one seems on the safe side to me.
What User is Doing the Mailing in CreateUserWizard.MailDefinition? »« OO Design Creates A Problem
Basically sharepoint (and I guess aspnet/iis) has this concept of a site (SPSite) and a web-application (SPWeb). I guess this is another example of the interface/implementation split which is so frequently used in object-oriented designs. This is what gives aspnet the pluggability that is everywhere throughout the system. It’s cool and I like it a lot. No more rebuilding the wheel, not that I can see anyway…
But it does make your life a little more difficult. Case in point: I’m trying to enable anonymous access in sharepoint. It turns out that you’ve got to do this for the webapp as well as for the site collection. I’m fine with that, but I did have to read how to do it. I guess everything that I will want to do to this website I will have to read up on first before I can get anything done. Or I will learn this pattern and keep my eyes open for it naturally.
“could not open user control path”. this is what i’m getting now. it doesn’t look like there’s much info on this error either. clearly this has something to do with the interaction between my forms-based authorization setup and the smartpart. i only see this error message when i’ve added the smartpart to the page using my fba user account.
I gave <machine_name>IUSR_<machine_name> read permissions to my UserControls directory and the problem went away. I’m not sure this is a safe thing to do though so maybe I will come back with another update to this issue when I find out.
<add name=”Profile” type=”System.Web.Profile.ProfileModule” />
this is what was missing from my application. adding this into the httpModules section of the web.config made my Page.Profile object appear. sweet. now i can keep moving forward. that took about an entire weekend.
Here’s the link.
Totally radical guide on how to undo the mess I just made. Now the My Sites work again. I had at least one issue in my previous attempt to set this up, and it was that I did not create a blank site at the root of the My Sites web application. I guess it makes sense to do that but it’s nothing you’d really think of. Also you must enable self-service web creation on the web app you’re using to host the My Sites templated site collection.
blah blah blah
I still do not really understand why I cannot just create the /personal and /mysite site collections under the main web application. The instructions above say that the reason is because you need something to mark “Enable self-service web creation” but why not just mark the /mysite site collection as such? I’m too lazy to try it out, after all I’ve built and then torn down the whole thing at least a half-dozen times by now.
?contents=1
add that to the end of a web parts page and you will get a listing of all the web parts on a page with a few options for each part including delete and reset. whatever that means.
?PageView=Private
add this to an url and you’ll see your own personalized view of the page. switch the Private to Shared and you’ll see the page everyone else sees it. ugh.
_layouts/settings.aspx
this will show you the Site Settings page for any SPWeb. Maybe SPSites but I don’t know, just my guess. handy for the situation i’m in now, where none of the websites i create seem to have a welcome page, even though sharepoint spy seems to show me some default.aspx files at the root of each web.
Good Instructions for Config’ing My Sites »« This Was a Most Unpleasant Surprise
