Create custom site definitions which include CEWPS and using resource files for their content

Maybe my longest title for a post ever but I think it covers everything what I wanted to share with you..  In a previous post I mentioned a solution for a problem when a site template was being used with activated features that didn't provision very well. This post is about that solution ;)

It's not really difficult to create a new site definition (a lot of bloggers already paved the way for me there) but I had some difficulties adding a Content Editor WebPart (CEWP) with HTML into my definition. Since you have to replace the < and > symbols with &tl; and &gt; and you will have to put CDATA brackets around the whole thing as well. After several attempts to encode my HTML the proper way (and failing miserably), I decided to check how Microsoft put CEWP's in their site templates.. and this is how it looks:

<WebPart xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2">
                        <Title>$Resources:spscore,ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Title;</Title>
                        <FrameType>TitleBarOnly</FrameType>
                     ..
                        <Assembly>Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Assembly>
                        <TypeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart</TypeName>
                        <ContentLink xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2/ContentEditor" />
                        <Content xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2/ContentEditor">$Resources:spscore,ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Content;</Content>
                        <PartStorage xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2/ContentEditor" />
                    </WebPart>

"$Resources:spcore, ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Content", that's all the content they put in there! No encoded HTML with CDATA brackets at all! So what does it mean then? Well.. i'll tell you!

• $Resources : here they are referring to the fact that the content is placed in the Resources folder (/12 hive/Resources)
• spcore : here they are referring to which file the content is placed in
• ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Content : here they are referring to which value in the file must be used

So when we open up the spcore.xml file and find look for the "ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Content" value, it looks like this :

<Data Name="ReportCenterOnet_CEWP_Content">
    <Value>&lt;DIV class="ms-vb"&gt;
&lt;SPAN class="ms-announcementtitle"&gt;Report Center features include:&lt;/SPAN&gt;
&lt;UL&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;&lt;A title="" href="../Lists/Sample KPIs/KPIListViewPage.aspx" target=""&gt;Key Performance Indicators&lt;/A&gt; (KPIs) enable you to communicate goals, trends and track progress.&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;&lt;A title="" href="../ReportsLibrary/sample dashboard.aspx" target=""&gt;Dashboards&lt;/A&gt; enable you to give a more detailed explanation of your information using Excel workbooks and KPIs. Dashboard filters make it easy to select a range of information to view. To create your own dashboard go to the &lt;A title="" href="../ReportsLibrary/Forms/scsummpg.aspx" target=""&gt;Dashboards&lt;/A&gt; view of the Reports library and click 'New'.&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;The &lt;A title="" href="../ReportsLibrary/forms/current.aspx" target=""&gt;Reports&lt;/A&gt; library is designed to store files containing reports and dashboards and allow easy access to information from previous time periods.&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;/UL&gt;
&lt;SPAN class="ms-announcementtitle"&gt;To prepare this Report Center for use, the following actions are suggested:&lt;/SPAN&gt; 
&lt;UL&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;View the sample &lt;A href="../ReportsLibrary/sample dashboard.aspx"&gt;dashboard&lt;/A&gt; and &lt;A title="" href="../ReportsLibrary/sampleworkbook.xlsx" target=""&gt;workbook&lt;/A&gt; to understand some of the capabilities of this Report Center&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;If the samples do not work correctly ask an administrator to ensure that Excel Services are enabled and that this Report Center is a Trusted Location&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;If you plan to use Excel to analyze information from existing data servers, create and upload data connection (ODC) files to the &lt;A title="" href="../Data Connections" target=""&gt;Data Connection Library&lt;/A&gt;. If you want users to create new KPI Lists then add them to the "Owners" group. Users in the "Members" group can edit pages but can not create KPI Lists.&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;LI&gt;Update or remove sample content&lt;/LI&gt;
&lt;/UL&gt;
&lt;/DIV&gt;</Value>
  </Data>

So it seems you still have to encode your HTML but you don't have to worry about CDATA stuff :) The question is, why should you use the same technique as Microsoft does ?

• Makes the ONET.XML more 'readible' and thus easier to maintain
• No more messing around where to put the CDATA stuff
• One place to maintain the content of your CEWPs

Hope this gives you more insight about creating and defining site definitions as it did to me ;)

 

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