Best practices to follow while working with SharePoint Designer workflows

Hi Folks,

SharePoint Designer has its own limitations. We can follow the rules below which helps to prevent your workflow to get corrupted and to recreate it.


• Never delete a stage before deleting all actions and conditions within that stage first.
• Never delete a stage if another stage is transitioning to it. Make sure to modify the transition portion of the other stage first.
• Never copy and paste a stage. Create the stage manually and then copy and paste the actions into the new stage.
• Never delete an "IF" or "ELSE" without first deleting all the actions in the condition first.
• Never copy and paste an "IF" or "ELSE" block. Create the "IF" and "ELSE" conditions manually and then copy and paste the actions into the condition.
• Take backups of your workflow often using the "Save as Template" feature described here,http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj819316(v=office.15).aspx. This will allow you to rule back to the last backup if your workflow did get corrupted.

Interview Questions

Q. What is Forms based Authentication?
Ans. Forms Based Authentication (FBA) provides your own authentication method using a web form. SharePoint standard installation uses default AD to query the Domain controller to check user credentials through Windows Authentication. FBA uses a custom database created separate from AD to store User Credentials. FBA is executed by SQL DB query. When FBA is used to extend SharePoint sites, external users (non AD users) have access to SharePoint.
http://www.topsharepoint.com/form-based-authentication
http://blogs.visigo.com/chriscoulson/configuring-forms-based-authentication-in-sharepoint-2013-part-1-creating-the-membership-database/





Q. What is SharePoint Workspace ?
Ans. SharePoint Workspace (Groove) allows you to take the whole SharePoint site, synchronize it and work on the whole site off-line.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4axc3ZOm8

If-Else branch issues in SPD Workflow

I came to know that we can't perform multiple if-else branches in designer workflow. The workflow won't have any errors and it will get saved. But, it won't get published and will throw an error.

Please see the below link for more details.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/scriptcenter/en-US/67b1e945-1515-4155-81a2-dc0c2108e370/0-0-activity-id463-validation-failed-an-ifelseactivity-must-have-at-least-one-child-of-type?forum=sharepointdevelopment

Online Exam for different technologies

http://www.a2zmenu.com/Online-Exam/index.aspx 

November Questions

Q1. What is Responsive Web Design?
Ans1.
Responsive web design makes your web page look good on all devices.
Responsive web design uses only HTML and CSS.
Responsive web design is not a program or a JavaScript.

Web pages can be viewed using many different devices: desktops, tablets, and phones. Your web page should look good, and be easy to use, regardless of the device.
Web pages should not leave out information to fit smaller devices, but rather adapt its content to fit any device: Desktop, Tablet, Phone.

It is called responsive web design when you use CSS and HTML to resize, hide, shrink, enlarge, or move the content to make it look good on any screen.

August Questions

Q. What is the difference between PowerPivot Excel workbooks and Regular Excel workbooks?
Ans. PowerPivot Excel workbooks offer a mechanism to relate between different tables which regular Excel workbook doesn't.

Q. What is the difference between DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) formulas and Excel formulas.
Ans. DAX formulas are designed to be as similiar as possible Excel formulas. But, DAX works with tables rather than cells in tabular fashion. DAX never uses cell coordinates (B2, C3 and so on). Also, DAX doesn't work on cell ranges.To work with ranges, you can use DAX
functions to apply filters to narrow down the data you are interested in.

Here is a simple example of a DAX formula:
=FactSales[SalesAmount]-FactSales[TotalCost]


Q. Which features make Excel an excellent BI client tool.
Ans. PivotTables and PivotCharts.

Q. How to automatically refresh PowerPivot Data in SharePoint?
Ans. Refer the below links
          https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg413467%28v=sql.110%29.aspx
          https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780735643406/samplepages/9780735643406.pdf

Q. How can you filter SharePoint list view based on membership group?
Ans. http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.in/2012/10/sharepoint-filtering-view-by-group.html 

Q. How will you load EcmaScript function in SharePoint 2010 and in SharePoint 2013 ?
Ans. In SharePoint 2010, we can load EcmaScript function by
        jQuery(document).ready(function() {

 ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(myfunction(), "sp.js");
});

In SharePoint 2013, we can load EcmaScript function by

 jQuery(document).ready(function() {
 SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', myfunction);
});

Q. What is the difference between item.Update() & item.SystemUpdate() ?

Ans. With item.Update(), we update the changes that are made to the list item. Is that all what it does?
 No, internally it also updates the “ModifiedBy” and “ModifiedOn” fields as per the current logged in user and 
current server time. Optionally it also updates the version of the item if the Versioning option is turned on for that
 specific list.

So, at any point if we wish not to update these extra things i.e. the “ModifiedOn”, “ModifiedBy” and the “Item Version”, then the solution for it is to use item.SystemUpdate() instead of item.Update(). This will help you in updating only those fields which are specified within your code blocks.

July Questions

Q. What do you mean by Office365 / SharePoint Online site?

Q. What is the difference between "OneDrive" and "OnDrive For Business"?

Q. How can you allow extranet users to access SharePoint Online sites?

Q. How will you access properties for a specific user using REST API in SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premise site?

Q. How can you prevent Workflow Recursion (How can you call a workflow from other workflow?)

Q. How can you extract a substring from a string in SharePoint 2013 workflow?

Q. How can you loop through in SPD 2013 workflow?