Designer Tools Top SharePoint Designer 2010

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is a freelance journalist and Web design program, Microsoft SharePoint and other web sites. It is part of a SharePoint product family. SharePoint Designer shares its codebase, uI and HTML rendering engine of Microsoft Expression Web, and not rely on Internet Explorer Trident engine, which is less standards compliant. One of the differences of general application, web design, Expression Web, which contains only the SharePoint site-specific models.

SharePoint Designer 2010

April 24, 2010, the latest version of SharePoint Designer was launched, has been appointed the 2010th With SharePoint Designer SharePoint Designer 2010, you can build a full, rich, reusable, process-centric applications on the SharePoint platform, integration external data. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes it possible to build composite applications or configuring the design of components such as data sources, lists, content types, views, forms, workflows, and external typesall content without writing code. In addition, SharePoint Designer 2010 now offers tools for all major components of a SharePoint solution.

The user interface of SharePoint Designer 2010 has been completely redesigned to put SharePoint in SharePoint Designer. Now, all major components of a site or a list of solutions and content types, views and forms, workflow, external data sources and types of content, layout and master pages are easy to find. The new file tab, it is easy to open existing websites or create new sites. You can also open the pages and sites you've recently worked with, and add new components such as lists and workflow for the current site Each site has an introductory page where you can change the settings or manage various aspects of your site. For example, you can now manage permissions directly from the 2010th SharePoint Designer navigation pane, it is easy to find and access all the important components of a site you use to build a solution for the gallery pages make it easy to find and edit some of the important elements of your solution. The band will make you more effective and productive in SharePoint Designer 2010, because the tape surfaces all important functions in the proper context for what youre working. Another new interface for SharePoint Designer 2010 is focused on the surface of all the important components of a SharePoint solution. If you used the folder list in previous versions of SharePoint Designer, you can still have experience of working with files and folders on your site through all files in that view.

It is not just SharePoint Designer 2010th Theres a lot more for SharePoint 2010th Leverage SharePoint Designer and other useful features in SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint or SharePoint Server 2010 Foundation - dedicated hosting or shared with a provider SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is a freelance journalist and Web design program, Microsoft SharePoint and other web sites. It is part of a SharePoint product family. SharePoint Designer shares its codebase, uI and HTML rendering engine of Microsoft Expression Web, and not rely on Internet Explorer Trident engine, which is less standards compliant. One of the differences of general application, web design, Expression Web, which contains only the SharePoint site-specific models.

Update an item sends an email problem in SharePoint

One major requirement with SharePoint is you set up a workflow which sends a notification mail to list of people when anyone updates the item in the list.

Now this is cool. However the problem here is when actually nothing is modified, then also SharePoint kicks an email and people gets it and wonder what has changed when nothing was actually changed in any of the list items.

To give you a simple scenario, create one list, go to SharePoint designer and create a workflow, attach to the list and select the option which says trigger when item is updated. In workflow send an email to yourself. Now go to the list, create one item. Open the same item, without changing anything, click on ok and there you go. You caught the problem; you still get an email even though you did not change anything.

Well before diving to the solution let me make one thing very clear. What we are looking for is an out of the box solution. We do not want to write any code. Event handler is the best place to write a code and handle this situation, because we can get new value and the old value of the field in the event handler. We can compare all fields with previous and current value and if any of them is modified, then we can send an email else leave it as it is.

But we are talking about the no code solution. So definitely there are some drawbacks to it. But it definitely solves this problem. 

All you need to do is create fields as many fields as you have in the list. If you have seven fields, then you need to create seven more fields in the same list. You can name them anything, but to make it a meaningful, keep the same name of the field, and only append copy to it. Example, we have Title field in the list and new field will be TitleCopy. If Details is the field, then new field will be DetailsCopy.

Soon you will come to know why we are doing this. Well to give you a quick answer, to compare these fields.

After creating Copy fields as we discussed. Follow these steps.


2) Create one workflow from File-New workflow menu.
3) Give a name to the workflow.
4) Attach it to the list.
5) Select trigger this workflow when item is created.
6) We need to define a condition which is always true, you can make condition like if 1 ==1, then in action, Set TitleCopy to ListName:Title, then DetailsCopy to ListName:Details.

Like this set all copy fields to the original fields.

This is your first workflow. Now we also need to create second workflow. I know question has come to your mind that why do we need to create a workflow for assigning this values. We could have created the calculated column and assign the values. Well, I have not done this. Why? You need to find it yourself. Try doing this and you will realize that okay we cannot take approach of calculated columns.

Coming back to the point, create one more workflow, attach it to the same list, and give it a name and select trigger this workflow when item is updated and this time your condition will be like this:

If Title is not equal to ListName:TitleCopy or Details is not equals to ListName:DetailsCopy. In this way, make a condition by combining OR for all fields. If this is true, then send an email in the action.

Add second step in the workflow, check the condition if Title is not equals to ListName:TitleCopy, then in action, set TitleCopy to the ListName:Title.

Add another step in the workflow, check the condition if Details is not equals to ListName:Details, then in action, set DetailsCopy to the ListName:Details.

Add steps for all fields in the list. Now you again must be wondering why we are creating each step for comparing and assigning the values of the field. Well, I would say try it yourself in putting all condition in one step and see the result. You will realize that okay we cannot that this approach. And hence each step must be performed for each individual field.

What we have done here is, first workflow will be triggered when we create the item and assign the values to the copy fields in the list.

Second workflow will be triggered when we modify the list item and in that we have checked the original value which is currently in the Copy fields with the changed fields. If any of them is changed, then only we trigger an email and after triggering we again compare which field is actually changed and we assign the changed value to the Copy field so as to compare it with the next time.

I know question might come that these all copy fields will also be visible at the time of creating, editing and viewing list items. Well you can write a code not to show these copy fields while performing create, edit or viewing the items. Or you can also use jQuery technique to hide them.

I recommend you read Using jQueries in SharePoint for how to hide fields and other stuff.

Now we have solved the problem of sending mail when not updating anything in the list. Mail will be send only when something is actually changed. Try it yourself and do share your thoughts on this.