A vendor is developing our website, and in the process of moving the website from one envirnoment to another (which includes changing the URL of the website), it takes days to correctly change all of the hardcoded URL's in the custom web parts. The vendor says that this is how SharePoint works, and that they cannot use relative URL's, or variables to store the URL of the site, nor that they can do a search and replace to find all of these places. Can anyone confirm these or offer any other solutions?
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We had the opposite when migrating a sharepoint site. Some of the default webparts included with sharepoint *will convert relative urls to absolute* and the only way we could manage to get around it was to create a program to recurse through everything and fix the links.
I think the problems stemmed mostly from the publishing sites.
The vendor is saying that the MOSS content web parts need a full URL to be put into the links, and that it will not accept relative URLs.
m1gee: What did you write the script in that would recurse through and fix the links? Can you tell me more about this? If there's a way to recurse through them, there is surely a way to search them as well.
"The vendor is saying that the MOSS content web parts need a full URL to be put into the links, and that it will not accept relative URLs."
Yup! Exact problem sounds like we had.
I just know that it was not easy, because programatically it's hard to change the content of that webpart. I dont think I ever figured it out, and I can't remember how we ended up doing it :/ I dont think microsoft made it accessible through the code to change it, but then again I'm not 100% sure.
Ah. OK, I have an answer. If you read the following URL about how Microsoft built the Hawaiian Air website using MOSS 2007 they state that they use the Publishing Control RichHTML controls instead of the CEWP (Content Editor Web Part) NOTE: Our team exclusively uses publishing web sites because all features are automatically enabled and by default use these parts.
http://blogs.msdn.com/shar
As a work around to this issue the following developer wrote his own custom event handler to fix this issue: http://devcow.com/blogs/jd
OK I remember more now...
That will work for any CEWP's that were added to the page. The ones that are default on the page *do not show up* in the webpartmanager.
IE. When you create a page for a publishing site, most have embedded parts that act just like CEWP's but they dont show up as a modular webpart. THESE will not show up in the webpartmanager enumeration.
Those were the ones that we were not able to get to through code.
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by: tedbillyPosted on 2008-01-10 at 13:41:47ID: 20631584
Your vendor is incorrect. I managed a 7 server Sharepoint web farm that is used globally by over 9,000 users.
We are actually telling people the opposite to use relative paths because we are running into support problems with absolute paths.
Also, moving sites should be done using STSADM to completely avoid this problem using either a import/export or backup/restore process.
By hardcoding URL's do you mean in the webpart configuration or the actually code?