11.6. Creating Policy Administration Tools
Associating a custom policy file with a content type is powerful, but administrative users will not be able to change the policy unless they can associate a different file with the content type at runtime. Two approaches come to mind. You could provide a custom user interface for entering the acceptable bid amount and estimated hours and then generate an XML file, or you could create a command-line tool.
Working with XML files via command-line utilities is a lot easier than developing a UI, especially if the schema is changing frequently during development. In addition, you might like to enable a machine-driven process or a script to modify the policy rather than require human interaction. Fortunately, the wise and benevolent SharePoint gods made it quite easy to extend the stsadm command-line tool with your own custom commands. Listing 11-13 shows a custom stsadm extension for setting the proposal management policy that will be applied to new or existing proposals based on your project proposal content type.
Example 11.13. A custom STSADM command to apply proposal management policy
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin;
using ProSharePoint2007;
namespace ProposalManager.Admin
{
/// <summary>
/// Implements a custom STSADM command to display the proposal management
/// policy specification for a given site.
/// </summary>
public class GetProposalPolicy : ISPStsadmCommand
{
#region ISPStsadmCommand Members
string ISPStsadmCommand.GetHelpMessage(string command)
{
string msg = "Displays the current Proposal Management policy.";
return msg + "
" + "-url <url> the url of the site to process";
}
int ISPStsadmCommand.Run(string command,
System.Collections.Specialized.StringDictionary keyValues,
out string output)
{
int result = 1;
const string ProposalContentTypeName = "Project Proposal";
try {
// validate the arguments
if (keyValues["url"] == null)
throw new ApplicationException("No url supplied.");// open the website
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(keyValues["url"])){
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()){
// load the Project Proposal content type
ContentType ctProjectProposal
= new ContentType();
if (ctProjectProposal.Create(web,
ProposalContentTypeName) == null) {
throw new ApplicationException(
string.Format(
"Failed to locate Content Type "{0}'",
ProposalContentTypeName));
}
// load the policy
ProposalManagementPolicy policy
= ProposalManagementPolicy.FromContentType(
ctProjectProposal);
// convert to text and return result
output = policy.ToString();
result = 0;
}
}} catch (Exception x) {
output = x.ToString();
}
return result;
}
#endregion
}
} |
To deploy the command, you simply install the assembly into the Global Assembly Cache and create a command definition file named stsadmcommands.proposalmanager.xml in the 12CONFIG folder.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<commands>
<command name="setproposalpolicy"
class="ProposalManager.Admin.SetProposalPolicy,
ProposalManager.Admin, Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3c6b2ee283bb579c"/>
<command name="getproposalpolicy"
class="ProposalManager.Admin.GetProposalPolicy,
ProposalManager.Admin, Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3c6b2ee283bb579c"/>
</commands>Figure 11-12 shows the new command being executed.
Figure 11.12. Figure 11-12
