Thinking out Aloud

I’m proud to announce that I have been awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for my efforts in the community.

“Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Services technical communities during the past year”

I hope to continue my efforts on the MSDN Forums, publish new content on my blog on a regular basis and support the community to prove the award is deserved.

Central Administration has a screen allow users to change the application pool identity, but doesn’t allow you to change the application pool which the web application uses.  You can modify manually by opening IIS, changing the application pool and making changes to the metabase.xml.  But how do I make these changes programmatically?

Theory

An IIS Web Site in SharePoint is represented by the SPWebApplication class http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebapplication.aspx this has a property called ApplicationPool which allows to be retrieved and set http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebapplication.applicationpool.aspx. 

Code

System.Uri webAppToChangeUri = new System.Uri(“http://intranet”);
SPWebApplication webAppToChange = SPWebApplication.Lookup(webAppToChangeUri);
webAppToChange.ApplicationPool.Name = “ALL MOSS”;
webAppToChange.Update(true);

webAppToChange.Provision();

Demo

I ran this code inside a windows form, you can use this or a console application.  The current application pool and the one I want to change it to has the same identity, so I just changed the ApplicationPool Name.  If your identify is different you will need to set the Username and Password properties as well.

Before running the code the intranet web application has the following properties

After I run the code, right click IIS Manager and click refresh.  I open the properties of the intranet web application and check the settings have came through.

That’s it.

Why change the application pool?

For every application pool a w3wp process will be launched and can consume large amounts of memory.  You need to find a good balance of isolation (provided by having many application pools) and consumption of memory.  Have a look at Joel’s article here http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/29/sharepoint-app-pool-settings.aspx

When you create a column on a list or site column in SharePoint through the user interface you enter the column name, type and any other properties.  The name is used for the internal name and display name.  The internal name is escaped to remove any special characters and spaces.  The table below displays the list of characters and their escaped version.

Character	Hex Code	Escaped Version
[space]	20	_X0020_
|	7C	_X007C_
-	2D	_X002D_
\	5C	_X005C_
(	28	_X0028_
)	29	_X0029_
‘	27	_X0027_
,	2C	_X002C_
!	21	_X0021_
%	25	_X0025_
&	26	_X0026_
?	3F	_X003F_
$	24	_X0024_
£	A3	_X00A3_
“	22	_X0022_
<	3C	_X003C_
>	3E	_X003E_
=	3D	_X003D_
#	23	_X0023_

 

The following are examples of this escaping:

Name entered	Escaped Version
Published Date	Published_X0020_Date
Buyer’s Name	Buyer_X0027_s_X0020_Name
Zip / Postal Code	Zip_X0020__X002F__X0020_Postal_X0020_Code

 

Please note: The internal name has a maximum length which is calculated after the internal name has been escaped.

There are a few way’s to check the internal name, one of which is the through the User Interface, here’s how:

1.  Open a web browser.

2.  If you have created a site column open the site column gallery, if you created a column on a list open the list settings.

3.  Click on the column name.

4.  Check the URL for the “field” querystring parameter, as you see from the screenshot below it contains the internal name.

 

Other ways include …

using .NET

You can also find out the escaped version using the System.Xml namespace and the XmlConvert.EncodeName.  For example:

using System.Xml;

// encode the column name
string escapedString = XmlConvert.EncodeName(“Published Date”);

// decode the escaped column name
string normalString = XmlConvert.DecodeName(escapedString);

which produces

escapedString = Published_X0020_Date

normalString = Published Date

 

Content Types Viewer

Download it here MOSS Content Types Viewer – Home

More about the Content Type Viewer http://www.davehunter.co.uk/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=100.

You can browse to the SharePoint environment, browse the content types and investigate the columns which are associated to the content type chosen, using the “show fields” button.

 

Controlling the internal name

You can control the internal names when you provision the site columns using a feature.  You can also do this using the User Interface by creating a field without any spaces or special characters and then re-edit the column to change the display name with any characters you wish.

 

Hope this helps