ListFormWebPart and Tzuanmi SharePoint Designer

Last Friday I posed the question of being able to create "more than SharePoint but less than InfoPath" input forms without having to resort to writing an entire facade on top of a SharePoint List. Didn't get any response to things but I did some digging into the WebPartPages namespace. Microsoft creates a raft of WebParts that are used to create the SharePoint UI itself. The ListFormWebPart and ListViewWebPart are particularly interesting as you just point them at a list and they're supposed to handle all the heavy lifting of generating forms and views. And they do. All of the .aspx pages for lists use them so that's how all the extra columns you add to lists and document libraries appear when you add/edit an item or document. The ListFormWebPart just automagically creates the form on the fly by interrogating the list, getting the fields and their datatypes, and creating the various controls (TextBox, CheckBox, Dropdown, Calendar, etc.) for you.

Anyways, I thought I would be clever (I always think I'm clever when I do these things) to create one of these things (they're sealed so you can't inherit your own Web Part from them) and render it in my own Web Part. Before the render (in the pre-render event) I could just grab the contents of the Web Part and make some "on-the-fly" modifications (like joining up dropdowns, etc.). That idea is a bust because as hard as I try, I can't do anything with the ListFormWebPart once it's been created. I can create it fine, set the list name and all that jazz but it always seems to render an empty Web Part. Poking around inside Reflector didn't show me much either (is SharePoint really that proprietary that Microsoft has to obfuscate the code?) so I'm at a loss how to tap these classes. Even though they're sealed, I don't recall anywhere Microsoft saying you can't use them (some classes are marked for internal use only, but not these ones). Just use them for good, not evil. Anyways, the quest goes on and I'll continue to post my findings here as I try to discover a value for them outside of what SharePoint does with them.

Tzunami SharePoint Designer. I spent most of my Memorial/Victoria day looking at this new tool. Tzunami used to be the old K-Wise guys (there were some tools for SharePoint 2001 from them like K-Doc if I recall). The Designer is meant to be a tool that you can bascially build up your entire portal structure offline, saving it in various iterations to a local file (after sucking down the initial site from a SharePoint server), then committing those changes back to SharePoint to create everything. The tool is just coming out and has some growing to do but the initial reaction is pretty good. There are a couple of things that I noticed with this version:

1. There's a Disconnect option but it seems to clear the project's contents. So you're really always connected to the server but it's not like being in the web interface where everything you do is committed immediately. With Designer you must invoke the commit through a menu which then hooks up and creates/updates all your lists and whatnot. Personally I think the model isn't quite right. I would rather be able to work completely offline and then sync up (say when I got back to the office after spending 300 hours on a plane ride designing my portal). Maybe that's a feature to come. It seems like it could support it.
2. There are a bunch of features that are grayed out in this version like copy and move but I'm told they're coming.
3. There are some elements of editing things like document libraries (like say exposing it on the Quick Launch) that are not present in the interface. Again, I'm told these are coming.

The biggest thing that is mulling in my noodle is the fact that you can alter creation and modification dates on things like lists and list items. I need to do some digging to see how they're doing this because the properties through the Object Model are read-only so methinks they're doing something down at the database layer because I can't see how else they accomplish this. That bothers me for two reasons. First, never ever ever ever ever (did I say ever) touch the database directly. Period. Do not pass Go. Do not collect your versioned documents. There's just so much going on behind the scenes with transactions and logging and synchronization and other SQL stuff oh my. Even if you go through the documented stored procs Microsoft just won't support you and there are so many things that can go very, very bad doing this.

Second, while there are a lot of people that jump up and scream when they try to migrate their data into SharePoint and generally rant about how it can't retain the original dates and such, I personally believe there's good reason why those things are read-only for developers in the Object Model. Basically it's a CYA thing. Yes, your developers do need access to be able to make changes to a site but do you really want them with the ability to alter that information once it's set? With all the SOX stuff going on, it's a good thing that when you write an item to a list you'll always know who created it and when it was last modified. Hold on, now with a single tool I can alter history! I can say "No, you didn't create that document on Monday May 13, 2001. Bob created it on Friday June 3, 2002." No, that's not a feature I want to enable. As well, there's a question of data integrity. SharePoint doesn't have a lot of it. I can delete a lookup value in a list or a user from Active Directory and depending on the phase of the moon, the information may or may not be there later. However I can always be rest assured that something silly will never happen like a modification date being set earlier than a documents creation date. Well, that's out the window now with this tool and if I did have any reports I created on aging those are probably going to take some explaining now.

Anyways, if you into cutting edge tools and don't want to wait you can contact them to get a trial version. Like I said, there are some features missing and some features you might not want to have. The support guys are excellent and responsive so if you do have any questions they'll be happy to answer. The trial runs for something like 7 days and has a limited number of commits you can make to the server.