Welcome User Web Part

Overview

The Welcome User Web Part is a simple Web Part which is used to display a Greetings message along with a digital clock, the date and time being picked up from the client’s machine. The standard Greetings message changes depending upon the current time of the day. E.g.: Good Morning Allen or Good Afternoon Allen or Good Evening Allen.

The Web Part provides an optional area to display any kind of external data like; the company’s stock price, some useful information from the database or even invoke a web service to get some valuable information and get it displayed within this area..

The data for the external data area is fetched and displayed using the DLL “WelcomeUserExternalData.dll”, which could be found within the BIN directory of the SharePoint web site to which the solution gets deployed. The code base for the DLL is also supplied along with the downloadable package and can be customized to display information as per requirement. Note: By default “Hello World!” gets displayed within the external data area.

Flow Architecture

After being installed within a SharePoint server, the Web Part can be used in any of the SharePoint site pages by just editing the page and adding the Web Part using the Add Web Part dialog box.

Some Features and Benefits

Once the Web Part is added onto a page, then the user has different options of changing the Look and Feel of the web part by changing / modifying the properties from the Tool Part window.

Display Customization

This section gives an option to display the date and time, external data and an external data row separator along with the greetings message by checking the checkbox beside each of these options. Additionally it also provides an option for horizontal text alignment within the Web Part.

Greeting Customization

If you want to override the default greeting which gets generated based on the current time, this section allows you to achieve this by a customized greeting message. Leave the section blank if you want to display the default greeting messages. 

Font Customization

This section allows applying of various font customizations like; choosing the font family, font size, font color, font bold and italic options to the greeting message, date / time and external data display areas.

Language Customization

The language section is limited to the default greetings messages and the date format. There are three language options; English, French and Spanish and selection of any will display the corresponding default greeting message along with the language specific date format.

How to Install?

1. Download the package “WelcomeUserWebpart.zip” and unzip the content.
2. Go Into the folder “Installer” and Double Click on “Install.cmd” to add the solution.
3. Go to Central Administration -> Operations -> Solutions Management and click on the installed solution “welcomeuserinstaller-1_1.wsp” (this is the one which got added up in Step 2).
4. Click on Deploy Solution and select the web application to which you want the solution to be deployed on.
5. Click OK to deploy the solution against the selected web application.
6. Go into the web application (to which the solution was deployed in Step 5) and navigate to any page where you want to consume this web part.
7. Edit the page (using Site Actions context menu option) and add the “Welcome User Web Part” using the Add Web Part dialog to the selected zone within the page.
8. Now you are ready to use the Welcome User Web Part.

How to Uninstall?

1. Delete the Web Part from the specific page of the SharePoint website.
2. Go to Central Administration -> Operations -> Solutions Management and click on the installed solution “welcomeuserinstaller-1_1.wsp”.
3. Click on Retract Solution and select the Web application from where you want the solution to be removed.
4. Click OK and wait for a couple of minutes for the retraction process to complete.
5. After completion of the process, double click the “Uninstall.cmd” file present within the “Installer” folder of the downloaded package to remove the solution form the server.

More about External Data DLL

The code base for this DLL can be found within the unzipped folder of the downloaded package. This can be customized as per requirement to display data from various sources like; database, web services, etc. The code base needs to be re-compiled after all the modifications and the fresh DLL needs to be re-placed within the BIN folder of the web application to which the solution was deployed.

Note: The structure of the DLL should not be changed i.e. the name of the DLL, the class name, the method name and the return type (which is string) should remain as it is. The customized code should go into the Try block and should have the output generated as string.

Download
            To download the package, click here.
            To watch the video, click here.