Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 35: Building Applications Using Windows SharePoint Services Data 969
The formatting also supports the use of HTML links. (You can see this function
simply by entering http://.) We must warn you, however, if you expose
links to external users, you must consider security. If you do use links, they should
be accessible to anonymous users.
Locate the Windows SharePoint Services Web Part GUID
As you probably know, Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server
use system GUIDs to manage Web Parts and objects within the environment. In true
object-oriented fashion, this arrangement allows one object to be reused by all users.
In our example, we selected a discussion list that is actually a List View Object.
When we created it, Windows SharePoint Services created a GUID to identify the
settings and data we gave it. When the Web Part is rendered on a page, the GUID
is used to get the object and then add the settings and data to it when it is displayed.
This process is how Windows SharePoint Services keeps track of almost every item
created—from a list to a document library.
As in Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, if we want to
access a Web Part, Web Part data, or both, we also need the GUID because it is the
only way to locate the item we want to access. Using the GUID, we can pursue the
following options:
■ Instantiate the same object on a different page.
■ Use the GUID to instantiate the same object in a different Windows SharePoint
Services site.
■ Use Microsoft Office to move data between Windows SharePoint Services Web
Parts and Access, Word, and Excel.
■ Access the data directly in the content database (as in our example).
There are three ways to get the GUID for a specific Web Part: by using Notepad,
by using FrontPage, or by querying the content database.
To use Notepad to locate a Web Part GUID
1. Open your Web browser, navigate to the site (in our example, http://s2003e:382).
2. Navigate to the new page we created to display the discussion Web Part.
3. Right-click the page, and select View Source. This opens the page’s HTML
code in Notepad.
4. In the Edit menu, click Find (or press Ctrl+F) to open the Find dialog box.
5. Search for the title of the Web Part by typing in its name, Problem/Solutions
Knowledge Base.
The first occurrence in the file will be the title assigned to the TD tag; the
next occurrence should be the actual title between tags.