This post is more of a note to myself but may save someone else a lot of wasted time trying to track down why they can no longer save selected nodes in Umbraco. In a recent project I created a number of custom user controls for the Umbraco Dashboard, these user controls contained validations controls but I had overlooked adding the validationgroup property on the validation controls so when attempts were made to save or publish a node containing one of these user controls that didn’t validate, the changes would not save as the page could not be posted back to the server. The problem is not always immediately obvious if the user control that is not valid is on a different tab to the one you are on when attempting to save or publish.

I guess an alternative or complimentary method would be to display a Javascript alert notifying the user that there are still controls that don’t validate.

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While working on my customisations to Tim Geyssens MailEngine I was looking for an accurate method of automatically creating a plain-text version of the HTML emails that were being sent out by the site. Further reading brought my attention to something called Markdown. After some hunting around with a little help from my friend Google I managed to find a markdown XSLT file. Using the XSLT I could transform my HTML email to plain-text with relative ease and accuracy. Of course in order to do this I would need a valid XML document and as my pages were already valid XHTML I had no problems there.

Here is my method for doing the conversion, all it requires is that you pass it the HTML you want to convert which must be valid XML:

/// <summary>
/// Converts to HTML to plain-text.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="HTML">The HTML.</param>
/// <returns>The plain text representation of the HTML</returns>
private static string ConvertToText(string HTML)
{
    string text = string.Empty;

    XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    XmlDocument xsl = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml(HTML);
    xsl.CreateEntityReference("nbsp");
    xsl.Load(System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/xslt/Markdown.xslt"));

    //creating xslt
    XslTransform xslt = new XslTransform();
    xslt.Load(xsl, null, null);

    //creating stringwriter
    StringWriter writer = new System.IO.StringWriter();

    //Transform the xml.
    xslt.Transform(xmlDoc, null, writer, null);

    //return string
    text = writer.ToString();
    writer.Close();

    return text;
}

Download the XSLT file I used from here:

http://symphony-cms.com/downloads/xslt/file/20573/

I would love to hear from anyone that does this differently or if you can find any problems with the method I have chosen to implement for this solution.

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Some months back Tim Geyssens was kind enough to send me the source for his MailEngine addition to Umbraco before he released it on his blog. I made some customisations to the source to allow users to select templates and changed the filtering options slightly but other than that it worked jut fine for what I needed.

There was however one problem that became apparent when this was used in production. Sometimes, and apparently randomly the sending of mail would freeze when going to more than say 150 recipients. After a long time trying to track down the reason I stumbled across a post linking to the ‘SmtpClient does not gracefully close the underlying TCP/IP connection‘ issue on the Microsoft Connect website. I guessed it couldn’t do any harm to set the MaxTimeout property of the SmtpClient to 1 so I tried it and it seemed to work – so far so good however you should note the recent comment from someone with regards to using this method on IIS7.

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For me every day is a school day and every day I learn something new. Today the light shined brightly for me when I discovered a great time saving shortcut in Visual Studio to implement an Abstract Class or Interface in Visual Studio. Using the shortcut will populate all of the abstract class method signatures for you.

CTRL + > or you can use  SHIFT + ALT + F10

Here is an example of a new custom Application tree I was implementing for the Umbraco CMS:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco

{

public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

}
}

With your cursor at the end of the class signature you can then press CTRL + > or SHIFT + ALT + F10 and you will get a smart tag offering to implement the abstract class or interface, hit enter and the result is as follows:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco
{
public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

protected override void CreateRootNode(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTreeNode rootNode)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void Render(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTree tree)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void RenderJS(ref System.Text.StringBuilder Javascript)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}
}
}

A simple example of something that can be a huge time saver particularly when the inherited class or interface has a large number of methods to implement!

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I have just finished another upgrade from umbraco 3.06 to v4.0.2.1 and hit a snag whereby whenever a user attempted to add a new media item after the upgrade they were presented with the following exception:

ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Source Error:

Stack Trace:

[ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media]
   umbraco.cms.presentation.Create.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +415
   System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +15
   System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +33
   System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99
   umbraco.BasePages.BasePage.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +12
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1436

After a bit of digging I discovered the following Work Item on CodePlex and the following comment from jvisch which provided me with the solution:

1. Open the UI.xml file located in /umbraco/config/create
2. Search for the node with the alias ‘media‘
3. Change the alias to ‘Media’ with a capital M
4. Save the file
5. Restart the website by making a slight change to the web.config file and saving it

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I have recently been working on another package for the Umbraco CMS. During the course of packaging the extension I hit a problem with the existing package actions that were available via the core and the PackageActionContrib project.  You can easily add an Application Tree but none of them could successfully update an existing Application Tree during the uninstall process. As my package action modified an existing application tree in order to add a custom menu item I needed to write a new package action that could do this at install and then revert it during the uninstall process.

You can download the Update Application Tree Package Action and with a bit of luck this issue can be addressed at some point in the future or my package action can be submitted to the PackageActionContrib project for consideration. Make sure you drop the dll into your bin folder before you need to use the action.

Example package action usage:

<action runat="uninstall" undo="false" alias="UpdateAppTree" treeAlias="media" treeHandlerAssembly="umbraco" treeHandlerType="loadMedia" />

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When Umbraco 4 was first released I had issues with 2 of the upgrades from v3 in that the templates disappeared from the UI and clicking on any of the DocumentTypes resulted in an exception taking the form of “No node exists with id ’1040′”. Today I was working on the site again and it was bugging me so I checked the forums and found this post however it wasn’t resolved as far as I could tell.

I did a little digging around in the database and found some references in the cmsTemplate table to template master documents with the id 1040…bingo! I changed all references to a suitable master template that did exist and all of the above issues magically went away.

I thought it was too much of a coincidence for the node id in the exception to be the same for others as it was for me so I looked for a pattern in where this reference existed and they all seemed to be templates for what I think was the original Creative Website Starter (CWS) package. Would be interested in comments from others that might be able to confirm this.

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In a project I am currently working on there is a facility for Umbraco users to export Membership and Profile data. As part of the export the client also wanted to include the groups a member belongs to and here is how I achieved it, I hope it is of use to someone else.

Member m = new Member(mid);
// Loop through the member groups and add them to the field
foreach (MemberGroup mg in m.Groups.Values)
{
//- Do your stuff in here, e.g.
csv.Append(mg.Text); // Appends the Member group name
}

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In an ongoing project I am working on I needed to adapt a custom user control that was being used as a DataType in Umbraco. I needed to locate the nearest node that had a specific property set and default the selected value of my control to the value of the property in the parent document.

Here is the final piece of code:

//- Get the current document as our starting point
Document currentDoc = new Document(Convert.ToInt32(Request.QueryString["id"]));

//- Climb the tree looking for a parent node with the property set
while (currentDoc.getProperty(“myProperty”) == null)
{
currentDoc = new Document(currentDoc.Parent.Id);
}
//- Set the value in the list if it exists
if (this.myDropDownList.Items.FindByValue(currentDoc.getProperty(“myProperty”).Value.ToString()) != null)
{
this.myDropDownList.Items.FindByValue(currentDoc.getProperty(“myProperty”).Value.ToString()).Selected = true;
this.myDropDownList.Enabled = false; //-Disable the control so the branch can’t be changed
}

Thanks again to Tim Geyssens for the tip that led me to my final solution.

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Yet another problem on an Umbraco v4.0 site I am working on currently. The site will be hosted on a VPS with Plesk as mentioned in an earlier post, I needed to restore a backup of the remote database locally but after restoring it my local development copy throws the exception “Invalid object name ‘umbracoUser”. After an hour or so of frustration and searching for a solution I realised that the table owner and schema belong to a user on the remote data source which didn’t exist locally.

The Solution:

Run the following SQL statement and output to text and it will generate all of the ALTER statements need to change ownership of the object to DBO(Database Owner):

SELECT 'ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER ' + s.Name + '.' + p.Name
FROM sys.tables p INNER JOIN
sys.Schemas s on p.schema_id = s.schema_id
WHERE s.Name = 'EXISTING_OWNER_USERNAME'

What you should find is that you are presented with a list of alter statements similar to those below which if you execute will change owner of all tables owned by the owner you specified in the first step and assign ownership to DBO:

ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContent
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContentType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContentTypeAllowedContentType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContentVersion
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContentXml
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsDataType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsDataTypePreValues
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsDictionary
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsDocument
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsDocumentType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsLanguageText
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMacro
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMacroProperty
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMacroPropertyType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMember
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMember2MemberGroup
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsMemberType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsPropertyData
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsPropertyType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsStylesheet
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsStylesheetProperty
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsTab
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsTagRelationship
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsTags
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsTemplate
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoApp
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoAppTree
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoDomains
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoLanguage
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoLog
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoNode
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoRelation
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoRelationType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoStatEntry
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoStatSession
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoStylesheet
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoStylesheetProperty
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUser
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUser2app
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUser2NodeNotify
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUser2NodePermission
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUser2userGroup
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUserGroup
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUserLogins
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoUserType
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.cmsContentTypes
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoContent
ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER oldowner.umbracoContentAll

After executing the above everything started working again as expected.

Thanks to a blog post by Steve Schofield that led me to the solution.

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