Sunday, June 26, 2011

Hiding the Ribbon for Anonymous Users

If the SharePoint site is intended to be used as public internet site you might wanna show it only for authenticated users, so regular anonymous users won't ever notice it's a SharePoint site.

I've found a couple of articles describing how to do that:
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/itaysk/archive/2010/04/23/hiding-the-ribbon-for-anonymous-users.aspx
http://www.topsharepoint.com/hide-the-ribbon-from-anonymous-users

Basically in all posts how to hide ribbon either ASP .NET LoginView control or SPSecurityTrimmedControl are used. Each of them has it's own issues.

Using ASP .NET LoginView makes page editing not convenient. In order to correctly edit page Editor should click "Edit Page" twice.

Using SPSecurityTrimmedControl requires to set a list of permissions needed to view Ribbon and it's not obvious which security mask should be used.

Also in both cases Front-end guys need to wrap each editor specific control in one of these controls. It means that there might be e.g. 10 LoginView or 10 SPSecurityTrimmedControl controls on the page.

Another solution would be to use 2 master pages - one for the authenticated users, another - for anonymous. It's quite easy to maintain. One master page (auhtoring) should have all SharePoint specific stuff (ribbon, scripts, etc). Another page (runtime) should not have any of that. Important: both master pages should have all ContentPlaceHolder's which are used by page layouts.

Switching between master pages is performed in code. You can decide the place where to put it. You might want create control and put it on both master pages. In my case all our page layouts was inherited from our custom class. Master page switching code should be put in OnPreInit method. It could look like this:
protected override void OnPreInit(EventArgs e)
{
        base.OnPreInit(e);
        SwitchMasterPageIfNeeded();
}
private void SwitchMasterPageIfNeeded()
{
        if (SPContext.Current != null && SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser != null)
        {
                MasterPageFile = "CustomAuthoring.master";
        }
}


Of course it's up to you which solution to choose. But it's good to know that now you have one more way to go.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Ribbon for multilingual sites without changing locale and installing language packs

Recently I've faced with strange Ribbon issue. It works fine for English (United States) sites, however it doesn't display images for e.g. Russian site.

Searching for solution in Google brought me to this post: http://www.martinhatch.com/2011/01/blank-ribbon-check-your-locale-settings.html. And the solution would be to change web locale from actually needed to English. Of course such approach is gonna bring a lot of localization troubles.

Another workaround would be to install language specific language pack. For some reasons that doesn't sound good for me. Consider having site collection with 50 sites with different languages. Downloading ~150 Mb and installing language pack for each of them is not the best solution.

So, initially the issue is that image URL look like this: /_layouts/1049/images/formatmap32x32.png. 1049 - is locale ID for russian language.

Looking at source code using Reflector just confirmed the fact that URL part after "_layouts/" is web's locale ID which is set in "Site Settings" > "Regional Settings".

I was thinking about different solutions how to solve that and finally went with URL Rewriting solution. I have some experience working with IIS URL Rewriter (hopefully will share it in future posts), so it took me 5 minutes to get it working.

You can read more about IIS URL Rewriter and it at http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite.

URL Rewriter has user-friendly GUI which allows to manage providers, route maps and rules. This configuration is stored at the application's web.config. So, I'll just share this part of web.config (put it in configuration > system.webServer element):
<rewrite>
    <rules>
        <rule name="HandleRibbonCulture">
            <match url="_layouts/\d{4}/(.+)" />
            <action type="Rewrite" url="_layouts/1033/{R:1}" />
        </rule>
    </rules>
</rewrite>
Each time page will try load Ribbon resource URL e.g.  /_layouts/1049/images/formatmap32x32.png will be rewritten to  /_layouts/1033/images/formatmap32x32.png which is always available. Enjoy!