Abhinav Sobti’s blog

Programmatically get Navigation Settings in SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013

Abhinav Sobti — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 01:20:28 GMT

While writing some custom SharePoint Web Services (asmx) in a project, I encountered a situation where I needed to fetch the Navigation Settings of the current subsite and the site collection. After lots of head scratching and searching online, I found out the below pieces of code useful in getting the navigation properties for SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013. You must include the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace. Note : The following applies only to SharePoint sites with publishing features enabled. Other properties can be found in the SPWeb.Navigation (web.Navigation) object however.

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("https://yourweburl/"))
{
    using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
    {
        var publishingWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(web);
        navSettings = new NavigationSettings // My Custom Model
        {
            Name = publishingWeb.Name,
            IncludePagesInCurrentNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.CurrentIncludePages,
            IncludePagesInGlobalNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.GlobalIncludePages,
            IncludeSubSitesInCurrentNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.CurrentIncludeSubSites,
            IncludeSubSitesInGlobalNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.GlobalIncludeSubSites,
            InheritCurrentNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.InheritCurrent,
            InheritGlobalNavigation = publishingWeb.Navigation.InheritGlobal,
            QuickLaunchEnabled = publishingWeb.Web.QuickLaunchEnabled,
            TreeViewEnabled = publishingWeb.Web.TreeViewEnabled
        };
   }
}

Useful, isn't it? You can try setting them as well using the Update() methods after assigning desired value to each of the properties to save changes to the navigation properties.

Clear Excel cells using Windows PowerShell

Abhinav Sobti — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 03:16:28 GMT

This will guide you how to use Microsoft PowerShell to clear cells in an Excel worksheet. Loading the Excel file from your location :

#####################################################################
 ## Load Excel file
 $ExcelPath = 'D:\MyInputFile.xlsx'
 $Excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
 $Excel.Visible = $false
 $ExcelWorkBook = $Excel.Workbooks.Open($ExcelPath)
 $ExcelWorkSheet = $Excel.WorkSheets.item('MySheetName')

Writing the clearing logic with the help of nested For loops for rows and columns :

#####################################################################
 ## Clear Logic
 $RowMax = ($ExcelWorkSheet.UsedRange.Rows).count        ## get the total count of used rows
 for($i=2; $i -le $RowMax; $i++)         ## skip the header
 {
        for($j=2;$j -le 12;$j++)
        {
                $ExcelWorkSheet.Cells.Item($i, $j).clear()
        }
 }

Saving and closing all connections to Excel :

#####################################################################
 # Close connections to Excel
 $Excel.DisplayAlerts = $false
 $Excel.ScreenUpdating = $false
 $Excel.Visible = $false
 $Excel.UserControl = $false
 $Excel.Interactive = $false        ## set interactive to false so no save buttons are shown
 $Excel.ActiveWorkbook.Save()        ## save the workbook
 $Excel.ActiveWorkbook.Close()        ## quit the workbook
 $Excel.Quit()

Clearing the object references is always a good idea. You can use the following snippet to do so :

#####################################################################
## Close all object references
 Release-Ref($ExcelWorkSheet)
 Release-Ref($ExcelWorkBook)
 Release-Ref($Excel)

## Function to close all com objects
 function Release-Ref ($ref)
 {
        ([System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject([System.__ComObject]$ref) -gt 0)
        [System.GC]::Collect()
        [System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()
 }

Sample Input : Sample Output : Complete Script can be downloaded here.

Babysteps into the SharePoint World!

Abhinav Sobti — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 18:53:44 GMT

I recently joined Microsoft as an Associate Consultant in Microsoft Services India Global Delivery - Business Productivity. I shall be working as a SharePoint Consultant here. I'll keep posting blogs as I enter the SharePoint World which might be helpful for people who're very new to SharePoint.