Webparts in MOSS 2007 - Part 1

Webparts can be considered as reusable widgets (similar to the yahoo ones) which work independently (though they can communicate) and are individually configurable. This makes the task of showing up of different logical sections on the same web page easier; especially while doing independent development. Brought out initially with Sharepoint 2003, it was supported in ASP.NET extensively and now in MOSS 2007 .

OOB WebParts
Out of the box, MOSS provides you with numerous webparts which could be used with minimal configuration. You would want to check out the webpart gallery which list down these.

Some of the interesting OOB webparts :
Image Webpart : To display images from sites/from another webpart
Site Aggregator : To display sites of your choice
RSS Viewer : To get feeds from any RSSContent Query : To display a content type.
Business Data List : List from LOB/Webservice configured in BDC

Development Concerns
As soon as you start to swim through webpart documentations, you are faced with the dilemma of two parent WebPart classes which provide more or less the same functionality. Which one do you use? From what I could figure out, System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart is the most commonly used for WebPart development and the simplest.

The immediate descendant class defined in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart was intentionally provided for compatibility with Sharepoint 2003 and also for performing complex webpart functionalities which include cross page web part communication, communication between webparts not in the same webzone, data caching etc.

The good part is, if you use the System.Web.UI.... WebPart, you could reuse the webpart in an ASP.NET application too, assuming your webpart does not have any MOSS specific calls. To summarise, stick onto the System.Web...WebPart for most of your regular requirements .

Classes of concern
WebPartManager - Microsoft (and now me) loves manager and provider classes. In this case, WebPartManager acts as the point of entry to access the various features of the various webparts in a page. This means that there is exactly one WebPartManager for a webpage. If you are using the masterpage provided by MOSS 2007, this would mean that the WebPartManager is already available to you (things get different when you do plain ASP.NET development)

WebPartZone - This is physical place/zone on the page where WebParts reside.

Writing the first WebPart

Now that we are decided on the parent webpart class to use for our WebPart, the main job we have is to tell what needs to be rendered. Simple enough, override the render function :)

public class MyFirstWebPart : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
{

  private string displayText = "MOSS Rocks";

  [WebBrowsable(true), Personalizable(true), FriendlyName("Display Text")]
  public string DisplayText
  {
    get { return displayText; }
    set { displayText = value; }
  }

  protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
  {
    writer.Write("Typed Text is " + displayText);
  }
}

OK, so who is going to talk about the attributes? Here goes:

WebBrowsable - makes sure that this property is listed in the property editor when the WebPart is configured.
Personalizable - Setting a value of true on this attribute makes sure that the property value is maintained for individual users.
FriendlyName - The easiest of the lot, this displays the friendly text for this property in the property editor.

Deploying a WebPart
There are two ways to deploy a webpart to the server :
a.) Direct copy/register Copy the WebPart dll to the _app_bin of your application and mark the assembly as safe in web.config. There you go, WebPart is all setup in your current application and ready to use.


b.) CAB This is the recommended way to deploy webparts in the live environment. What you do is create a DWP (dashboard web part) XML file together with a manifest file, wrap it up in a CAB project. Use this CAB project together with the stsadm command line tool at the server to register your WebPart. Check out more about DWP files here.

In the next post, we shall look at rendering some meaningful stuff at the render method, Property Editors, Inter Communication between WebParts.