A external company made a design for a Internet facing website, in the design the search control was made up in to rows. So my first idea was to create a new controltemplate for the SmallSearchInputBox, but then I realized that in moss the search-control isn’t a controltemplate anymore (in WSS it is). The searchbox in MOSS is a control called SearchBoxEx, and this has some properties for the layout of the control. But is always renders the output as a table with 1 row, so my problem was how to render is in 2 rows using divs. Google didn’t provide me with an answer, so is started coding myself (I don’t want to create a new control with all logic, I just want reuse all the logic of SearchBoxEx and provide new render logic).

I finally found a way to do this, I just create an new control that inherits from SearchBoxEx. My custom look-and-feel can be done used an override of the CreateChildControls:

protected override void CreateChildControls( )
{
    base.CreateChildControls( );

    if ( Controls.Count < 2 )
    {
        return;
    }

    HyperLinkLoc hlink = null;
    if ( Controls[ 1 ].GetType( ) == typeof ( Table ) )
    {
        Table tabel = ( Table ) Controls[ 1 ];

        // Loop through cells to find the go button
        foreach ( TableCell cell in tabel.Rows[ 0 ].Cells )
        {
            if ( cell.Controls.Count > 0 )
            {
                if ( cell.Controls[ 0 ].GetType( ) == typeof ( HyperLinkLoc ) )
                {
                    hlink = ( HyperLinkLoc ) cell.Controls[ 0 ];
                }
            }
        }
        tabel.Visible = false;

I first call the base.CreateChildControls to have SearchBoxEx create all the controls based on the properties set. Then I start looping through the tablecells to find the Go-button, the other controls (textbox & dropdownlist) are available as protected members. After the go-button has been found, I set the table to invisible. Now that I have a reference to the controls I can start building my own look-and-feel:

        if ( m_searchKeyWordTextBox != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbcell" );
            m_searchKeyWordTextBox.Style.Clear( ); // remove the width style, done in css
            div.Controls.Add( m_searchKeyWordTextBox );
            Controls.Add( div );
        }

        if ( hlink != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div3 = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div3.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbgo ms-sbcell" );
            div3.Controls.Add( hlink );
            Controls.Add( div3 );
        }

        if ( m_ddlScopes != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div2 = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div2.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbscopes ms-sbcell" );
            div2.Controls.Add( m_ddlScopes );
            Controls.Add( div2 );
        }
    }
}

Download source: searchbox

I have completed my application for import/export of variations, I have uploaded everything to codeplex so have a look there:

http://www.codeplex.com/variationsettings

A neat little command utility that lets you do three things:
- Export the current variationsettings and labels to xml
- Import the variationsettings and label from xml
- EXPERIMENTAL: create the variation hierachies

Background
This application was created to extend our daily buildprocess for a public internet website

More Information
Check out Michiel Lankamp’s blog entry: http://www.sharepointblog.nl/2007/10/14/variationsettings-importexport-utility-on-codeplex/

Want the code?
Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/variationsettings/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Want the build?
Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/variationsettings/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

Last week I was trying to enable variations using a feature in SharePoint, but I soon realized that I had a problem because Microsoft decided to make all the variation-class internal. So that shouldn’t be a problem, why not use reflection. That didn’t work either, so back to the good old Lutz Roeder’s Reflector to see what’s going on. I soon found out that variations are dependent on 2 hidden lists (VariationSettings, VariationLabels), both lists can be found using the AllProperties of the root web:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost"))
{
    using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb)
    {
        string _VarRelationshipsListId = rootweb.AllProperties["_VarRelationshipsListId"].ToString();
        string _VarLabelsListId = rootweb.AllProperties["_VarLabelsListId"].ToString();

        SPList VariationLabels = rootweb.Lists[new Guid(_VarLabelsListId)];
        SPList VariationSettings = rootweb.Lists[new Guid(_VarRelationshipsListId)];
    }
}

The variationlabels list contains a listitem for each variation that is available on the site, just add a new listitem to the list (make sure there is only one listitem that has the field “Is Source” set to true):

SPListItem variation = VariationLabels.Items.Add();
variation["Hierarchy Is Created"] = false;
variation[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = "EN";
variation["Description"] = "English";
variation["Flag Control Display Name"] = "English";
variation["Language"] = "en—US";
variation["Locale"] = 1033;
variation["Hierarchy Creation Mode"] = "Publishing Sites and All Pages";
variation["Is Source"] = false;
variation.Update();

The variationsettings are a little bit different, the settings are saved to the propertybag of the rootfolder of the list:

VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["SourceVarRootWebTemplatePropertyName"] = “sitetemplate#0”;
VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["EnableAutoSpawnPropertyName"] = true;
VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["AutoSpawnStopAfterDeletePropertyName"] = true;
VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["UpdateWebPartsPropertyName"] = true;
VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["CopyResourcesPropertyName"] = true;
VariationSettings.RootFolder.Properties["SendNotificationEmailPropertyName"] = true;
VariationSettings.Update();

These settings where easy, but then came the hard part, how do I create the hierarchies since all logic is internally scoped. Then I had a brainwave, why not try the good old webclient… It works:

using (WebClient webClient = new WebClient())
{
    byte[] response;
    webClient.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
    response = webClient.DownloadData(input.Url + "/_Layouts/VariationLabels.aspx");

    //get viewstate and requestdigest from page
    string viewstate = ExtractHiddenValue("__VIEWSTATE", Encoding.ASCII.GetString(response));
    string requestdigest = ExtractHiddenValue("__REQUESTDIGEST", Encoding.ASCII.GetString(response));

    //format the postdata
    string postData =
        String.Format("__VIEWSTATE={0}&__REQUESTDIGEST={1}&__EVENTTARGET={2}&__EVENTARGUMENT={3}",
                      viewstate, requestdigest,
                      "ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$ctl00$RptControls$variationLabelsCreateHierarchiesToolBarButton",
                      "");

    //send postdata to server
    webClient.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
    webClient.UploadData(input.Url + "/_Layouts/VariationLabels.aspx", "POST",
                         Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(postData));
}

Now I was finally able to create the hierachies in my build-script.

I finally did it…

I wrote my first article (dutch) together with my colleague Willem Boeré for Microsoft .NET Magazine. The article is about building SharePoint Solution with features and custom site-templates.
And finally I will start blogging about SharePoint, I have been doing MOSS 2007 projects for more than a year now (started with beta 1), so I will have quite a lot of stuff to blog about.

Hope to see you back again…