Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

13.8 Packaging and Deploying Web Parts 375

Chapter 13

13.8 Packaging and Deploying Web Parts

We have shown you how to develop a Web Part and manually deploy it to the

site collection’s Web Part gallery. The manual process can be convenient when

working in a development environment, but when it comes to deploying your

Web Parts in production, you should leverage the Windows SharePoint Ser-

vices 3.0 solution framework. We introduced the solution framework earlier

in the book, but let’s provide a quick recap of its purpose. In essence, the solu-

tion framework provides a method for collating the various components that

comprise a solution, packaging them together into a solution file, and deploy-

ing the solution in a consistent and efficient manner to the SharePoint Farm.

The deployment process can be initiated using stsadm.exe or using the central

administration browser interface via the operations solution management

page. During deployment, the files contained in the solution package are

examined and placed in their appropriate location on the server. If the solu-

tion package contains Web Parts, the Web Parts are placed in their appropriate

location, either the \bin directory or the GAC, and a safe control entry is

added to the Web application’s Web.config file. It should be noted that the

deployment process does not upload, or populate, the Web Part gallery with

the new .Webpart files. To achieve this you need to include the .Webpart file

in your solution package and use a feature to provision the .Webpart file into

the appropriate Web Part gallery. Features are covered in detail in Chapter 16,

Features; however, for completeness we will show you how to provision the

.Webpart file when packaging your Web Parts.

There are three methods available for creating a solution file. The first

involves using the command line tool makecab.exe, the second involves using

a setup and deployment project template in Visual Studio 2005, and the

third method involves using the Visual Studio 2005 Deploy Solution build

menu option. Chapter 11, Introduction to SharePoint Development explains

each method in detail. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the

first technique: building a solution file using makecab.exe.

13.8.1 Packaging the Web Part

When you are creating Web Parts in your development environment, you

will inevitably go through various stages of testing before the final Web Part

is ready for packaging. To test your Web Part, you will need to deploy the

Web Part manually through the steps defined earlier in the chapter. Once

you are happy that the Web Part runs successfully and is production-worthy,

you can package your solution. The following section picks up from the

development and manual deployment of our Web Parts—WebPart1 and

WebPart2.

376 13.8 Packaging and Deploying Web Parts

Step 1: Extracting the .webpart files

Earlier in the chapter we created two Web Parts, WebPart1 and WebPart2,

and deployed them to the Web Part gallery at the root of the site collection.

One of the first things that we will want to do is to export the .Webpart files

associated with WebPart1 and WebPart2 so that we can include them in our

solution file. The following steps show how to extract the .Webpart files from

the Web Part gallery.

1. Using your browser, navigate to the Web Part gallery at the root

of the site collection.

2. Locate the two Web Parts; they should be named WebPart1.Web-

part and WebPart2.Webpart.

3. For each Web Part, click the Edit Properties icon. The Web Part

properties page should appear.

4. From the menu bar, click Export and save the .Webpart files to

your desktop.

13.8.2 Step 2: Package the solution

1. Launch Visual Studio 2005 and open the project that contains

the code for WebPart1 and WebPart2.

2. Within the project, create the folder structure as shown in Figure

13.65.

3. Set the output build path to point to the .dll folder that you cre-

ated in the previous step. We need to do this so that the make-

cab.exe tool can locate the assembly and package it into the .wsp

file.

4. Import WebPart1.Webpart and WebPart2.Webpart into the

TEMPLATE\FEATURES\MyWPFeature\DWP folder in the

project folder hierarchy.

5. Navigate to the TEMPLATE\FEATURES\MyWPFeature folder

and add two new text files. Rename them Feature.xml and Provi-

sionedDWP.xml.

6. Open Feature.xml and insert the code shown in Figure 13.66.

Save the changes.

7. Open ProvisionedDWP.xml and insert the code shown in Figure

13.67. Save the changes.