SharePoint Read Only Databases and me as Developer

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nWhile working with SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2007, there are some scenarios when you want to take your content database of your web application to read only state.

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nFor example when?

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nThat’s a usual question one can ask , and answer is , when you / IT administrators are doing some migrations of your content database to some other system (like we do SharePoint 2007 upgrade to SharePoint 2010 by using database attach upgrade process) , or you / IT administrators are doing some maintenance of your SQL server

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nPractically doing this, you are making sure that end users are not adding contents to your site while you are working / migrating with content database

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nand good thing about SharePoint is , when you set your content database to read only state then SharePoint recognizes that and removes / hides all controls which cause any “Add” action to site

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nWell, you can do this in three ways :

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na.    by using stsadm

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nb.    by using visual studio

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nc.     by using SQL Server Management Studio (easy for IT admins)

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nHow to do this using stsadm?

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nHere is simple command which will put your site collection to read only mode and users wont be able to add new content

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nFor read only site:

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nstsadm.exe –o setsitelock –url http://yoursite/ -lock readonly

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nfor bringing site back to normal :

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nstsadm.exe –o setsitelock –url http://yoursite/ -lock none

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nDetails on Technet

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nHow to do this using Visual Studio? (I love this J )     

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nstatic void Main(string[] args)

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n{

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n try

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n {

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n   using (SPSite site = new SPSite(“http://yoursite/”))

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n   {

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n     site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

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n     site.ReadOnly = true;

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n     Console.WriteLine(site.ReadOnly.ToString());

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n   }

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n }

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n catch (Exception ex)

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n {

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n     Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

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n }

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n   Console.ReadLine();

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n }

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nHow can I do this as IT administrator?

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n·         Well that’s a pretty simple task if you having SQL Server Management Studio installed. Here are steps to do this

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n·         Open SQL Server Management Studio (for example for SQL Server 2008) and connect to the instance of database which is having your SharePoint content databases

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n·         Once you find your web application’s content database, right click on it and then select properties, now a small pop up window should open

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n·         in this new window , select Options from left menus and find option Database Read only and set that to true and you are done

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nOk this is good so far but what’s in it for me as developer??

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nYes interesting question, and obvious answer

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nwhile working with SharePoint and customizing / developing on top of SharePoint platform we usually create some web controls, web parts and so on , but one thing we should always consider in aspect of read only databases is , we should disable any “Add” functionality to site when database is in read only state

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nFor example, I have a web part which adds some data to SharePoint list when clicked , and suppose site database is in read only state for some instance ,what will happen? Error isn’t it?

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nSo to avoid this, we should always check database status of site like this

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nif (!site.WebApplication.ContentDatabases[0].IsReadOnly)

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n{

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n  if (!site.ReadOnly)

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n  {

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n    //Enable Add/Edit functionality

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n  }

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n}

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nelse

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n{

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n    //Disable Add/Edit functionality

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n}

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