Is spent most of today solving the problem I left with SharePoint last week (See Previous Post), in the end I find that for some reason the answer was more difficult than it needed to be.  It kind of leads me to the questions in my mind about how much information we can retain before each of us implodes.  When it comes to the shear amount of information we all have to remember it's sometimes a bit overwhelming especially for those of us in the Information Technology world.  The end result is always rewarding but sometimes involves a bit of frustration especially when every problem seems to be born of silly situations that just should not be.

At the end of the day it was a fantastic day to be grateful for; I solved my SharePoint problem, nothing broke and I have a beautiful fiance to come home to.  Tomorrow, that's another day and I'm sure another challenge will surface.  No complaints, if we aren't challenged than we never really understand what we are capable of.

I have spent the last few days attempting to get an event handler working on a document library.  The idea is that one would post a single control document in a library such as an InfoPath or Word form template and then the event handler would create a folder in a resource library and create a link in the core library that simply point to the resource library.  I was able to successfully create the logic to add the folder with no problem but it would not add the link no matter how many ways I recoded this.  It appears that there is a timing issue between when you add a new document through Word or InfoPath and when the SharePoint releases the lock on the new document.  When the document is in a lock state you cannot modify the list item.

While I found many articles dealing with how to set this up none of them actually point out this particular issue.  Now that the problem has been identified I can focus on how get the document in the proper state before attempting the modification to the list.  This definitely qualifies as one of those doah! moments.

The best tutorials I found on how to implement this functionality are actually on the msdn SharePoint site here under the 'Windows SharePoint Services 3.0' section in the video tutorials.

It seems to me that we are so focused on efficiency of process that we forget to be creative.  It is for me in particular one of those ideas that stifles the innovation that has made us who we are.  It is in our nature to want to be creative and to explore the possibilities but more and more I see the process police cracking down the whips just to satisfy the opinion of a few auditors.  If you take the time to think about it most great advancements in our society are the result of random thoughts collected together in a loose assembly.

Take the Internet example: It is simply inconceivable to speculate that the Internet in its current form would not exist today if the W3C didn't set standards in the beginning.  It seems kind of silly to go back and apply requirements to any new development moving forward without first considering that the innovators of this technology had quite a bit of latitude to be creative.  The Internet these days is all about standards and certifications to prove you understand those so-called standards usually created by people who aren't comfortable with change.

When all is said and done I believe we are selling our souls to the auditors just to appease a few individuals at the cost of innovative thought.