Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

454 15.3 Site Definition Solution Files

easy method to add list view Web Parts to a page; in fact, this is exactly how

the announcements and calendar list view Web Parts are instantiated in Fig-

ure 15.15. Figure 15.16 shows the corresponding

View element definitions.

The

View element has a large amount of associated attributes, all of which

are well documented in the WSS 3.0 SDK. These attributes allow you to

specify such things as how many row items to return in the View, and

whether to display only the files of a specific folder.

The

SiteFeatures element identifies the site collection Features to

activate in site collections created using the associated configuration. The

WebFeatures element identifies the Web Features to activate in sites created

using the associated configuration. Both elements contain a Feature child ele-

ment that is used to individually specify each Feature that needs activation.

All that is needed to activate a given Feature is the Feature ID. It is important

to note that SharePoint activates Features listed in ONET.XML in the order

in which they appear; if you have any Features that are depended upon by

other Features then these need to be listed first.

15.3 Site Definition Solution Files

In Chapter 10, Planning the SharePoint Deployment we introduced the new

solution deployment concept introduced with SharePoint Server 2007 and

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, which basically allows you to package all

the components that comprise your specific customization into a single solu-

tion file. The solution file is a CAB file with a WSP extension, and it provides

a convenient way to deploy site definitions across an entire SharePoint farm.

This means that you no longer need visit each Web front-end server to copy

your site definition files, and if you need to remove the site definitions from

the farm, you can easily retract the definitions using the central administra-

tion browser interface. There are many files associated with a given site defi-

nition, especially when you start tracing the features stapled to the site, and

we have seen that manually creating a site definition leaves a lot of room for

errors. The good news is that Microsoft has provided a number of Visual Stu-

dio tools to automate this process as much as possible. The tools are collec-

tively known as the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint

Figure 15.16

View element

definition.