Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

11.6. Creating Policy Administration Tools

Associating a custom policy file with a content type is powerful, but administrative users will not be able to change the policy unless they can associate a different file with the content type at runtime. Two approaches come to mind. You could provide a custom user interface for entering the acceptable bid amount and estimated hours and then generate an XML file, or you could create a command-line tool.

Working with XML files via command-line utilities is a lot easier than developing a UI, especially if the schema is changing frequently during development. In addition, you might like to enable a machine-driven process or a script to modify the policy rather than require human interaction. Fortunately, the wise and benevolent SharePoint gods made it quite easy to extend the stsadm command-line tool with your own custom commands. Listing 11-13 shows a custom stsadm extension for setting the proposal management policy that will be applied to new or existing proposals based on your project proposal content type.

Example 11.13. A custom STSADM command to apply proposal management policy

using System; using System.IO; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin; using ProSharePoint2007; namespace ProposalManager.Admin { /// <summary> /// Implements a custom STSADM command to display the proposal management /// policy specification for a given site. /// </summary> public ...