Using Microsoft Content Management Server to Display SharePoint Content (part 1) - The MCMS Connector for SharePoint Technologies

• MCMS is used to implement the Tropical Green Internet site, accessible to any user with Internet access and a browser. The targeted audiences for the Tropical Green Internet site are potential new and current customers. SharePoint is used to implement the Tropical Green intranet, which contains documents with information on how to care for specific plants as well as a list of upcoming events provided by Tropical Green. Some events are only available to employees while others are available to everyone.

• Searching MCMS with SharePoint, you can use SharePoint as the search indexer and engine to provide powerful capabilities on the Tropical Green Internet site.

The MCMS Connector for SharePoint Technologies

Previously we explored the Web Parts included with the Connector. These Web Parts were used to publish MCMS content and integrate MCMS workflow into a SharePoint site. The Connector also includes user controls and custom placeholders for use in your MCMS templates to facilitate searching with SharePoint Portal Server and publishing of documents from a SharePoint Portal Server document library.

Any document stored within a SharePoint Document Library can be added to a posting via the SharePoint Document Placeholder. If the display view you choose includes an icon, the placeholder will use the icon associated with that document type on the MCMS Server. If the document type is a Microsoft Office InfoPath form or a Word Markup Language (WordML) document, you can have the contents of the document displayed in the placeholder Control. Conversely, all other document types are shown as attachments and/or the document properties. This is controlled by which XSLT options you choose to render the document library items.

When a document is added to an MCMS posting via the SharePoint Document Placeholder, the document is copied from the SharePoint Document Library into the MCMS repository as a local attachment. If the document is of type XML, such as an InfoPath or WordML document, the XML is saved in the MCMS placeholder as well (this content in the placeholder is set to readonly from within the MCMS site). Changes to the document in the SharePoint Document Library are not automatically reflected in MCMS. The Document Updater utility is included with the Connector to synchronize changes done in the document library into MCMS (if the “update automatically” checkbox has been checked in the SharePoint Document Placeholder control when creating the posting). The tool, WssDocumentUpdater.exe, can be found in the Connector’s installation directory, C:\Program Files\MCMS Connector for SharePoint Technologies\CMS\bin\. This command-line tool can be set to run at regular intervals using the Windows Task Scheduler.

Using the SharePoint Document Placeholder

Let’s see the SharePoint Document Placeholder in action. First, we need to create and upload a document to a SharePoint Document Library:

1.	Create a new Microsoft Word document and enter the following text in the body of the document: This is content that is saved within a Microsoft Word file.
2.	Save the document to your desktop with the filename MCMS Published Document.
3.	Open Internet Explorer and browse to our SharePoint portal: http://portal.tropicalgreen.net/.
4.	Under the Actions navigation on the left-hand side of the portal, click Upload Document.
5.	On the Document Library: Upload Document page, click Browse and select the document we just created. Enter your name into the Owner textbox, pick Final in the Status dropdown, make sure Add a listing for this document is checked, and click Save and Close at the top of the form.
6.	On the Add Listing page, accept all the default options by simply clicking the OK button at the bottom of the page.

Upon uploading the document and creating a new listing, you will be automatically taken back to our portal homepage. If you look under the Links for You Web Part, you’ll see our document listed at the top of the list:

We now have a document in a SharePoint Document Library. Now we need to create a new posting in MCMS using a template that hosts a SharePoint Document Placeholder. In this situation we’ll use the sample project, CmsSharePointConnector, included with the Connector to demonstrate this placeholder.

Open Internet Explorer and browse to the CmsSharePointConnector project at http://portal.tropicalgreen.net/CmsSharePointConnector/.

The CmsSharePointConnector homepage contains some information describing the Connector, sample data, and some useful links. We’re interested in using the Internal postings and templates, so click the Internal channel link.

As you can see, the main page within the Internal channel looks just like a SharePoint portal site. We want to create a new posting using the News template as it contains a SharePoint Document Placeholder.

1.	Click the Switch To Edit Site link and then click the Create New Page link after the page reloads.
2.	When prompted to select a template, click the Internal Template Gallery, and then select the News template.
3.	Once the new posting is displayed, enter the following text in the top-most HtmlPlaceholder: My first SharePoint Document Placeholder posting.
4.	Now it’s time to add the Microsoft Word document we just created and uploaded to the SharePoint Document Library. Activate the Placeholder Properties dialog by clicking on the placeholder that has the following text inside the placeholder container: Click here to select a SharePoint library file...
5.	In the Placeholder Properties dialog, select the document we uploaded by clicking on the MCMS Published Document.doc link and click the Next button.
6.	You will now have the option to select the layout options, which correspond to either none, an icon with file name, or an icon with file name and properties. These layout options are configurable in the catalog.xml file and what options are available depends on the file type. Select the Attachment with Icon and Properties option, followed by the Finish button.

Once you’ve selected the document and display options, the dialog will close, your posting will reload, and you will now see how the SharePoint Document Placeholder displays your document.

Let’s save and publish the posting by clicking the Save New Page link in the left-hand navigation and giving it a name and display name of My First SP Doc Placeholder Posting. Now publish the posting by clicking the Approve link. After approving the posting, click the Switch to Live Site link to see how your posting really looks when published:

Previously we mentioned that you could use Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) stylesheets to transform XML from the properties and content of a document to HTML. A separate stylesheet is used for the document properties and content. All documents will have XML files for their document properties, but only InfoPath and WordML files are XML and can be transformed with a content stylesheet. You specify the stylesheet you want to use in the transformation in the Placeholder Properties dialog we just encountered when adding a document. The Connector ships with default stylesheets that we’ve already used. These stylesheets are found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Content Management Server\Server\IIS_CMS\WssIntegration\Dialogs\ WssDocumentFinder\TemplateCatalog\. The default stylesheets included with the Connector are listed in the table below:

The table above is based on documentation found in the Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 Connector for SharePoint Technologies help file, included with the Connector.

The SharePoint Document Placeholder looks at a single XML file to determine what stylesheets are available for the different types of files that can be attached to the placeholder. This file, catalog.xml, can be found in the same directory as the stylesheets outlined above. The catalog.xml file contains the following information on each of the available styles:

• Types of files the stylesheet can be applied to, such as jpg, gif, contentxml, or all (noted with an *)

• Descriptive name shown in the dropdown of the Placeholder Properties dialog

• Description of the stylesheet

• URL specifying the location of the XSL stylesheet used in the transformation

• A sample rendering URL, which is an XML file used to mimic the XML feed sent to the placeholder when a document is attached, giving the user a preview of the final rendering

In addition, you can also use a specific library that the stylesheet can be applied to using the SpecificWebUrl and SpecificLibrary attributes in the type node of the catalog.xml file. Use the SpecificWebUrl attribute to indicate which WSS or SPS site and the SpecificLibrary attribute to indicate the name of the WSS or SPS library to which the stylesheet can be applied.

You can create your own catalog.xml file for a specific SharePoint Document Placeholder implementation in order to restrict or provide certain rendering options for that library. Simply create a new XML file that conforms to the catalog.xsd schema definition file (found in the same directory as the catalog.xml and stylesheets) and specify this file in the HTML of your MCMS template that implements the SharePoint Document Placeholder using the RenderingTemplateCatalogUrl attribute and specifying the virtual path to your catalog file. For example, if you created a new catalog called mycatalog.xml, the SharePoint Document Placeholder would look like this in the MCMS template file:

<cc1:SharePointDocumentPlaceholderControl
id="SharePointDocumentPlaceholderControl" runat="server"
KeepSynchronized="False" PlaceholderToBind="SPSDocument"
RenderingTemplateCatalogUrl="mycatalog.xml">
</cc1:SharePointDocumentPlaceholderControl>