Thursday, December 3, 2009

Webparts Vs Field Control

SharePoint provides opportunity to Content Owners to manage their content and avoids IT staff involvement in content management. This facility is called Web Content Management. Developers can create either Web Parts or Field Controls to provide this facility. Often developers get confused if they have to use WebParts or Field Controls. If developer makes wrong choice on this, it would impact drastically.

WebPart: Is a web widget, which can added to WebPart Zone on a web page. WebPart can be personalized, means each user can set his/her own preferences. We can create either SharePoint or ASP.Net Webpart to place on SharePoint webpage.
Field Control: Field controls are simple Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 controls that you can create. They have a small amount of code to display the two modes of the controls: one for render time, and one for edit time. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide several default field controls that you can use in your pages. We can extend any of the default Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 controls for your own specific functionality.


WebPart features:
  • Allow content owner to add webpart on Page Layout
  • Allow Content owner to move existing webparts on different webpart zones.
  • Personalize webpart for individual users.
  • We can create Editor Part for editing content.
  • Webpart content is stored in ASP.Net 2.0 personalization data store not as part of Page Layout.
Field Control Features:
  • All content pages, stored in their respective site's Pages library, conform to a speciic content type. content type defines the content fields on the page such as the title, subtitle, date, page body, and page image
  • As it is part of the Page Layout, Keep track of version history of the page. Allows user to revert back to older versions.
  • Do not allow content owner to add or move field controls on the page. This would restrict role of content owner for editing content only. Leaving structure and placement to Developers and Designers.
  • Since it is part of the Page Layout, seamless searching is possible.
  • Edit and View modes are integrated with Page Edit Toolbar. Developer can design the fields controls better since we can differentiate between Edit and View modes.
When to use field controls or Web Parts in publishing sites
Scenario
Field Controls
Web Parts
Centrally controlled site branding and user experience
X
 
Content owner responsible only for content, not presentation
X
 
Content owners need freedom to modify the layout of the page
 
X
Versioning of all content in site for historical or regulatory reasons
X
 
Personalization of content

X
Implementation of functionality (aggregating content from other sites or from same site)
 
X

Thursday, August 13, 2009

My First Blog

Hi,


This is my first blog post. Would try my best to share my knowledge to developer community.


Eswar Rao