SharePoint Skater

This post is long overdue, but since the question keeps popping up on various SharePoint discussion lists, I figured I'd document the answer here (next time I can just post a link instead of typing the whole thing out again).

Monday morning, the calls started.  For some reason, long-time users were unable to edit list items.  I figured we had a permissions issue, so I popped in to look at the Site Settings -- and found that I couldn't.  A quick trip to Central Administration showed that I was still listed as a Site Collection Administrator, but I had no power at all on the site collection in question.

This came up today on the [sharepointdiscussions] list.  A user needed to display a read-only field in a phone number format; it's pretty simple, but it may be just what you need.

This came up on a discussion list lately, so I threw together some code to meet the need.  In short, a colleague needed to take the results of an InfoPath form survey and give them to the user in Word format.  The form data was already in a list item, so it was a simple matter of using the SharePoint API to get the list item, formatting the data appropriately, and using response headers to make the client machine treat the response as MS Word content. 

How many times has this happened to you?

This week, I had to create a few profiles (by hand) for Forms Auth user accounts.  Of course, in order to do this, you need to make sure the SSP's People Picker can recognize them.  I dutifully added the provider info and the requisite connection string to the SSP web.config, spun it up, and... nothing.  It had no idea who these users were.

Did you know that when you're working on custom Edit form and add an extra field via the Columns command, SharePoint Designer will sometimes add the field in Insert mode instead of Update mode?  Yes, it will.  Sometimes.  The binding portion of the field should look like this:

This really is no different from when you create an audience with regular old NTLM (Windows Authentication).  The difference is that while the AD provider is set up by default in all environments, the extra membership provider (that you use for Forms Authentication) isn't included anywhere except in the web application where you install it.  To be able to find your FBA users in the audience creation tool, you'll need to add the extra membership provider(s) to the web.config for your SSP site in IIS.  At that point, the People Picker should start recognizing your Forms Auth users, and you can create your audience as needed.