Attach an existing content database to the farm using PowerShell script

The Mount-SPContentDatabase cmdlet attaches an existing content database to the farm. If the database being mounted requires an upgrade, this cmdlet will cause the database to be upgraded.

The default behavior of this cmdlet causes an upgrade of the schema of the database and initiates upgraded builds for all site collections within the specified content database if required. To prevent initiation of upgraded builds of site collections, use the NoB2BSiteUpgrade parameter. This cmdlet does not trigger version-to-version upgrade of any site collections.

Syntax:

Mount-SPContentDatabase [-Name] <String> [-WebApplication] <SPWebApplicationPipeBind> [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-AssignNewDatabaseId <SwitchParameter>] [-ChangeSyncKnowledge <SwitchParameter>] [-ClearChangeLog <SwitchParameter>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-DatabaseCredentials <PSCredential>] [-DatabaseServer <String>] [-MaxSiteCount <Int32>] [-NoB2BSiteUpgrade <SwitchParameter>] [-SkipIntegrityChecks <SwitchParameter>] [-WarningSiteCount <Int32>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]]

Example:

Mount-SPContentDatabase "MyDatabase" -DatabaseServer "MyServer" -WebApplication http://sitename

This example mounts an existing database to the sitename web application. If upgrades are required, it triggers database schema upgrade and then performs only build-to-build upgrade actions on existing site collections if required. This operation does not changed the CompatibilityLevel for existing site collections in this database.

Mount-SPContentDatabase "MyDatabase" -DatabaseServer "MyServer" -WebApplication http://sitename -NoB2BSiteUpgrade

This example mounts an existing database to the sitename web application but it prevents any site upgrades from occurring. If upgrades are required, it triggers database schema upgrades only and no build-to-build upgrade actions are performed on any site collections. This operation does not change the CompatibilityLevel for existing site collections in this database.

For More Info:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607581(v=office.15).aspx

Common SharePoint Issues & Solutions

• PROBLEM:  When attempting to deploy a solution from Visual Studio you get an access error that includes this code – “SPUserCodeV4″

• SOLUTION: Go to Central Administration -> System Settings. Under the “Server” heading go to “Manage Services on Server.” Look for “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service” and enable it. If that doesn’t work, go to the Security item in the sidebar. Under the “General Security” heading, go to “Configure service accounts.” Each service has to have a user account assigned to it. Silly. I know. Select “Windows Service – Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service” from the dropdown, and leave YourBelovedandVeryImportantCustomer\spadmin as the account.

• PROBLEM: When running a user control that contains UserProfileManager, you get an error that says the object cannot be found

• SOLUTION: UserProfile Service has to be started in Central Admin. Follow the directions above, but enable both UserProfile services. You will be prompted to assign an account. Leave the account as YourBelovedandVeryImportantCustomer\spadmin. Reset IIS.

• PROBLEM: All your list searches return null. OR a programmatic list update fails.

• SOLUTION: Look at how you are creating your SPWeb item. If you are setting it equal to a local site, make sure the list is on that site. Here’s some handy code to get to the top level of the site without any items to dispose:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.Url))  {     using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())     {         SPList list = web.List["TheNameOfYourList"];     } } *Edit: SPContext objects should not be disposed, see Jason's absolutely correct comment below!

• PROBLEM: On a filtered list, you cannot select a value if it is the only row.

• SOLUTION: This one eluded me for a little while. In the “Miscellaneous” category of the web part editor panel, there is a “Send first row to connected web parts…” item. Initially this seems to just control when in the page life the data is sent. HOWEVER… In typical SharePoint non-logic logic…  this actually means “select first row by default.” The data binding event occurs regardless, except the datarow is empty if there is no selected row. Oh SharePoint, you poorly-worded rascal!

• PROBLEM: ”File Not Found” error. OR User Profile service cannot be accessed at all.

• SOLUTION:

• If you are only experiencing the first issue do this:
• Go to Central Admin > Application Management > Manage Services on Server
• Start the following:
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application
• Managed Metadata Web Service
• SharePoint Server Search
• If you still have a file not found error, restart IIS.
• If you STILL have a file not found error, restart SharePoint Web Services in IIS Manager manually
• If you are having user profile service issues, do the above, then check the following:
• Go to Start > Administrative Tools >  Services
• Both forefront identity managers need the following settings -
  • Make sure they are both disabled (SP will start them automatically)
  • Right click the service name and go to properties. Click the “Log On” tab. Chck “This Account” and put the farm account in. On our server its UCLA\SPAdmin, password is “password”
• Go to Start and enter “MMC” in search. Open the management console.
  • Go to “Add snapins” in the file menu
  • Add “Certificates”
    • Select Computer account for the account
    • Select local machine for the machine
  • In The following three places, look for security certificates that begin with “Forefront”
    • Personal > Certificates
    • Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates
    • Trusted People > Certificates
  • If none of the certificates exist, that’s fine. If they do, delete them.
• Follow the steps in Spence Harbar’s post here:  To delete the current user profile service and create a new one.
• After all this reset IIS.
• If you still can’t connect, check Central Admin > Application Management > Service Application – Configure Service Application Associations
  • Make sure the web app has the User Profile Service proxy enabled.

After you delete your current service, you may want to delete the Application Pool so that you can create a new one with a logical name. (The default is “User Profile Services Application” and it’s a pain to have to create new pools with new names all the time, but it’s nice to just clear the old one out and try again) Run PowerShell as an administrator, and enter do the following: enter Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell enter Get-SPServiceApplicationPool Copy the name of the pool you want to delete enter Remove-SPServiceApplicationPool “Name of my pool” Keep the quotes around the name

• • If you are still experiencing problems, you may want to restart all the associated machines.
    • If you do this, you may need to:
      • go to the your DB machine and open the sql config manager. Make sure all the services are started
      • On both the APP and WFE machines, make sure user profile service and all of the sharepoint services started back up.
    • If you get an error that the configuration database is unavailable from Central Admin, then you need to double check all the services on the DB machine from sql config manager. If you miss a single one, you may not be able to access SQL.

Clean up SharePoint User Profile Store using PowerShell

Today i had a problem in my development environment for my SharePoint Projects regarding User Profile Store. My user profile was a messed up and was not available for editing in central administration. When i searched for my profile it still there but not shown for administration.  This was a really strange behavior because a couple of days it worked well. I added various new profile properties to my user profile service application. So the recreation of User Profile Service 
Application was not an option. Deletion of orphan or corrupted user profiles is not possible using Central Administration or even using avaliable PowerShell commands.

But there is a solution using PowerShell without compiled code. Using PowerShell everything what is avaliable in the server object model is avaliable. First of all two assemblies must be referenced.
These assemblies are:

These assemblies are:

• Microsoft.Office.Server (Core SharePoint Server Assembly)

• Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles (UserProfile Assembly)

Script:

/* Load required Assemblies for SharePoint Server and User Profile */
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.Office.Server”)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles”)
/* Central Adminstration URL or any Web Application*/
$url = "http://myserver:Port"
/* Create a new Context Object */
$contextWeb = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://servername");
/* Get the right Service Context */
$ServerContext = [Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::GetContext($contextWeb);
/* create a new connection to the UserProfileManager */
$UserProfileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($ServerContext);
/* Ger all User Profiles */
$Profiles = $UserProfileManager.GetEnumerator();
/* Loop through user profile */
foreach ($oUser in $Profiles ) {
/* Remove Profile */
$UserProfileManager.RemoveUserProfile($oUser.item("AccountName"));
}

This script can be extended to delete only specific users from user profile information. At the end I was able to solve my problem. My User Profile was deleted and recreated on first access and due profile import. Everything worked fine.

In the old days you had to write some custom command line tool to address those batch update and deletion task. With the introduction of PowerShell to SharePoint any possible administrative task could be accomplished by just use scripting.

Those assemblies could be referenced using System.Reflection and the rest of the script is quite simple SharePoint Development. So get a context object, open profile service application get all use and delete them.

Update Mysites/UserProfile user image url

I have recently had reason to update the PictureURL property value via PowerShell in SharePoint 2013 for all users in the system.
As a result, I wrote the following PowerShell script to update the property value using string replace.

You will ideally need to run this on the server with an account with the appropriate permissions to update all user profiles.

Script:

#Set up default variables

  

  #My Site URL

  $mySiteUrl = "http://mysite/"

  

  #The part of the picture URL you are trying to find

  $currentURLValue = "http://mypersonalsite"

  

  #The value that will replace the above

 $newURLValue = "http://mysite:80"

 #The internal name for PictureURL

 $upPictureURLAttribute = "PictureURL"

 #Get site objects and connect to User Profile Manager service

 $site = Get-SPSite $mySiteUrl

 $context = Get-SPServiceContext $site

 $profileManager = New-Object   Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context) 

 $profiles = $profileManager.GetEnumerator()

 foreach ($userProfile in $profiles) {

  if ($userProfile[$upPictureURLAttribute] -ne '') {

    

    $newPictureURL = $userProfile[$upPictureURLAttribute].toString()

    $newPictureURL  = $newPictureURL.Replace($currentURLValue, $newURLValue)

    

    write-host "Before: " $userProfile[$upPictureURLAttribute].toString() " | After: " $newPictureURL 

    

    #Get user profile and change the value - uncomment the lines below to commit the changes

    #$userProfile[$upPictureURLAttribute].Value = $newPictureURL

    #$userProfile.Commit()

  }

 }

Get the Site Collection url's for a specific Data base using Powershell script

Get-SPSite -Limit All -ContentDatabase "DBTestSiteCol" | Select URL, Owner, SecondaryOwner | Export-CSV C:\SiteInfoDB.csv -NoTypeInformation

Deploying solutions in SharePoint 2013

Disable-SPFeature -Identity "Feature1" -Url "http://sharepointsite" -force

Uninstall-SPFeature -Identity "<Feature Name>" -force

OR

Uninstall-SPFeature -Identity "<Feature ID>" -force

Uninstall-SPSolution -Identity testsolution.wsp

Remove-SPSolution -Identity testsolution.wsp

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath "C:\Packages\testsolution.wsp"

Install-SPSolution -Identity testsolution.wsp -GACDeployment -CompatibilityLevel {14,15}

How to display Search Results filtered on a specific Content Source

One of the things you may wish to do if you have multiple content sources is to limit a search result to a specific Content Source. For example I have created a BCS connection to a database table containing a list of products from the sample database Adventureworks product table. When I search, I only want to see results from the products table, like below.



 The first thing we would need to do is setup a content Source. For this example, I had previously created a BCS connection to the Adventureworks product table. Now I will create a search content source to point to this BCS connection. When I create a new content source on the search administration page and select BCS Service, a list of external data sources display. In this example I selected my Adventureworks data source.

When I am done it displays here in my content source list. I will need to do a full crawl to populate the index with items.

 Next, I will want to create a Result Source.  A Result Source will allow me to create a scope, or a subset of the crawled content to only return my BCS content source data. in the snapshots below I created a result source called AWResultSource. Note that I have created this result source at the search application level. this allows me to leverage the result source from any site collection. I could also create this same kind of filter at the result page or site collection level which we will see later in this blog.

  

 On the new Result Source page I have chosen "Local SharePoint" and "SharePoint Search Results" and then I will select "launch Query Builder". This will bring up the page to build the actual filter. When I first go to select my property from the property filter, the content source property does not show up. I needed to select "Show all managed properties".

  

 Now I select the ContentSource property, choose Manual value, and enter the name of the content source I created earlier. On the right, you will get a sample of the results to make sure you are on track. If you get a nasty message about not being able to show a preview, you will need to turn on the "Search Server Webpart and properties" feature in site settings for the admin site.

 

The feature name:



 At this point, I have a content source to index the content, and I have a result source to filter search results for the content.

Now I will add it to a search center site. The rest of this blog is focused on modifying the search center site collection.
For your reference, go to the Site Settings page for your search center and select "Manage Result Sources". You will note that the Result Source I created above is in the list. If I had wanted to, I could have just added it here and it would be available for this site collection.



 At this point I need a page to show the filtered results with. This is the interesting part, the settings for the filter to only show the results for the content source is part of the results page. Now lets create the page. Go to the Pages library under Site Contents for the search center site. Select Files, New Document, and then Page. Note that the page layout is a Search Results page layout. choose a name and save. In the screenshot below I created a page called awresultpage.



Now we will edit the page to set our filter. Edit the page and choose edit the webpart for the Search results webpart. in the "Properties for Search Results" section, select change query.




 For "Select a query" choose the result source. In this case it would be the AWresultSource we created earlier. This will set the filter on the results we want. Again I should see a search result preview. Note that I could have set the result source filter right here instead of at the service application level. You have lots of options for the visibility level for returning a subset of the crawled index.



The last thing I need to do is to modify the Search Settings page under site settings to show the menu item on the search page. Here I will add a link under Configure Search Navigation.



 The link points to the results page I created.



Now when I go to the search page, I see products as a menu option. and when I click it, I see the results for the content source.