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I was trying to find an easy way to navigate directly to a custom SharePoint help page and figured there must be some URL parameters I could use to get there.  However, all my searching only turned up snippets of JavaScript such as this one…which is okay, but I really wanted to understand what /_layouts/15/help.aspx page was really wanting.

If you look at the link provided by clicking on the help icon, you may see some links like these, once you navigate to the exact topic you want to view.

Notice here you see AssetKey=.  This appears to expect some semi-colon delimited GUID on the parameter value.  I’ve found that using Key= is what you probably want to use.

What I wanted to do was provide the exact topic in some sort of URL parameter.  What I found is you can use this format.  It is essentially the name of your folders you created in your custom help and the help page’s context key separated by underscores, e.g. Key=MyCustomHelpCollection_MyCustomHelpCategory_1.  The missing piece here is the Context Key added on the end.  This takes you directly to the page, without having to navigate through the Collection and Category.  Note that the URL parameter name you might be tempted to use is AssetKey=, while the correct URL parameter name to use for this type of navigation is simply Key=.

What does this mean?  This means that after you create a custom help library by enabling the feature and creating some content, as discussed in these articles, you can link directly to your topics if you need to.

Create a Custom Help Library to SharePoint 2013

Create a Custom Help Library for SharePoint Foundation 2010

It’s really possible this information exists somewhere out there, but I sure couldn’t find it after a couple hours of searching.

…and I do mean Map!

Get your base image and copy it to the clipboard.  I’m going to use a map of the world.

On the asset-based navigation in SPD 2010, you’ll need to navigate to an object that will allow you to create an HTML file in it.  Here I’m using Site Pages, but you could also select All Files.  You probably want to save it somewhere so you can modify it later, if need be.

Open the file (Untitled_1.html) for editing.

Delete the HTML that came with the new page.

Paste your image into the page.

Click on the map image and then select Format under Picture Tools.  You’ll now have access to the Hotspot tool.  Select either the Polygonal, Rectangular or Circular Hotspot drawing tool.

Using your coloring skills you learned in Kindergarten, trace each of the areas you want to hotspot.

When you close the polygon, you’ll get a dialog where you can enter the address that the hotspot is linked to.

Copy all the source to the clipboard…

…and paste it into the HTML view of a content editor web part.

You should see it displayed with the regions visible.

The finished product.  Hovering over an area will give you "the hand" and clicking will take you to your hyperlink.

Today I helped a client solve one of the many mysteries around the infamous "Render Failed" that so many people seem to get at some point in time on MOSS 2007.  In this situation, the error started appearing on several list views and nothing had been changed for several weeks prior.

After some trial and error, I found the problem was tied to several site columns that were being displayed in the views.  The site columns were lookup columns and were used many places throughout the site hierarchy.  Of course, this happened on the same day that my son and daughter-in-law were having their first child (and our first grandchild), so I found myself troubleshooting from the waiting room at Medical City in Dallas.  I know this doesn’t have anything to do with the problem, but my son’s a new father and I’m a new grandfather…so sue me!  I’ve got a captive audience and I’m a proud grandpa.  🙂

Cason Noble Wright 2010-05-19

Anyway, it was really weird that nothing had been changed and this started and was fairly widespread.  After monkeying with filters, view styles, sorting, grouping to see if any of those things changed the outcome, I observed that, as I removed columns from the display, the views began to work.  That’s how I determined that the problem was tied to the site columns that were of the type "lookup."

To make things worse, later during the day the SharePoint site completely quit.  Now I suspected something was amiss on one of the servers.

This client has a simple two-server setup, so I VPN’d in to each server.  When I got on the SQL Server, I found that AUTOMATIC UPDATES was on and the machine had been updated and was awaiting a reboot.  Ah ha!  Finally a potential root cause. 

I quickly contacted the client and told them to reboot the SQL Server and the problem was solved.  And, TURN OFF AUTOMATIC UPDATES ON A PRODUCTION MACHINE!!!

Now, back to the grandbaby…

Reference Links:

Render Failed on a List View

KB950901

SharePoint Issues

KB925425

Update 20100908:  Leslee completed this in the production environment and it worked the first time.  I’m calling it a wrap!

Update 20100826:  We just did this in our staging environment and got it to work the first time through!

Update 20100802:  I’ve rewritten this post a couple of times, adding more detail as we find it.  We think we might be on to finding "the recipe," but we’ll only know for sure when we repeat the process in the staging and production environments and get repeatable results.  This post is "in-work."

Oh man, this has been driving us CRAZY (just ask Leslee)!  We have a multi-valued column in SharePoint (Subject) and we couldn’t get all the values to show up in the search results.  All we could get is the last value.  See this post: Always returning last value.

We had different results before we upgraded to SP2.  In SP1, we were getting some weird results with some of the values being returned as ;#Value;# or some such nonsense.  We hope we don’t see that again.

Currently, we are on SharePoint 2007 SP2 with the February 2010  June 2010 cumulative update with the infrastructure updates installed.

There were a few hints from Ontolica (Surfray) from this post.

From this post by Michael Schau, we started to deduce a method to fix the problem.  Here’s what we came up with.

Overview:

• Remove the mapping between your managed property and crawled property.
• De-select the "Include values for the property in the search index" field on your crawled property.
• Edit your crawled property category and select the checkbox to “delete all unmapped crawled properties.”
• Reset all crawled content.
• Perform a full crawl.
• Add your mapping back between your managed and crawled property.
• Change the HasMultipleValues column to True for your managed property in the MSSManagedProperties table in the Shared Services database (void your warranty).
• Change the VariantType column to 4127 for your crawled property in the MSSCrawledProperties table in the Shared Services database (void your warranty again).
• Perform another full crawl.
• Perform an incremental crawl (not sure if this is really necessary, but it’s pretty quick).
• Perform an IISRESET on all SharePoint boxes.

Let’s start with the ugly part first.  You’re not going to like this but, if MS doesn’t have software that correctly updates the database, then we’ll do it manually.  After all, it’s just a database!

Find your SSP database in SQL Server Management Studio.

Find the MSSManagedProperties table and open it for editing.  Locate your managed property using its FriendlyName and change the HasMultipleValues column to "True" (or 1).

Now find the MSSCrawledProperties table and open it for editing.  Locate your crawled property using its PropertyName and change the VariantType column to 4127.  We found when you change the VariantType to 4127 the Multi-valued field changes to "Yes."  All of the multi-valued fields we could find had this variant type.

The variant type for a text field is 31 (0000000011111).  The variant type that shows up on a multi-valued text field is 4127 (1000000011111).  Could it be that the leading bit identifies the field as multi-valued?  Here’s an incomplete table for the crawled properties in the SharePoint category.

You are done modifying the database.  Great job!  You’ve now voided your warranty.

Now we’re going back to Central Administration in the SSP where your search is located.

Remove the mapping for the crawled property from the crawled metadata store.  You can get there from the Metadata Properties page by clicking on Crawled Properties.

Find and edit your crawled property.  Remove the mapping and de-select the "Include values for the property in the search index" field.

Find your crawled property group (SharePoint in our case) and drill into it.

Click on Edit Category .

Select the checkbox to delete all unmapped crawled properties and click OK.

Reset all crawled content and perform a full crawl.  I hope you don’t have too much data!  Perhaps you should have thought to limit it before you started!

After the full crawl has completed, you need to add your property back.  It should be in the crawled properties.  You need to map it back to your managed property.  After you have it added back, perform ANOTHER full crawl, after which, you should see the property is correctly classified as multi-valued.

What does this get you?  Now, if you look at the raw XML search results for your managed property, you should see the multiple values returned.  In this example, we’re looking at a managed property called owssubject.

And, if you apply your XSLT, you should get something that’s nice looking, like this!

Search terms:

Multivalue fields in SharePoint search not returning all values

Multivalued fields in SharePoint search returning single value

Multivalued fields SharePoint search not working – broken

Can’t get multivalue field to return more than one result in Sharepoint search

Here’s the situation.  You created a content type and a page layout based on that content type and then discover that you need to redefine content types. In fact, you find that you should have created a parent content type and had other content types inherit from it.  After reworking your content types and site columns you now want to change your page layout so it references the correct content type.  You can do this by visiting the Master Page Gallery in SharePoint and changing the Content Type Name on the properties page.  If you were looking for a place to do this in SharePoint Designer, I haven’t found it.

Now, when you go back to edit the page layout in SharePoint Designer, you won’t get all those nasty errors informing you that it can’t find the Page and Content fields because it can’t find the content type.