Time zone Mayhem

So the other day, there I was minding my own business, when the request for a web part that showed the current Share Price for the US and GMT arrives on my desk.

No problem I think we have the source feed and it provides the information with the last updated date in GMT.  Unfortunately they want the FTSE price in GMT and the NYSE in EST.  Converting times accurately between time zones on a server with a differing time zone to the required 1 has been a notorious headache especially when you factor in daylight saving time.

This has been made easier with .NET 3X TimeZoneInformation class but I am not coding in .NET 3.x for Sharepoint were using 2.0, but I did find a Sharepoint equivalent.

The final solution was to store the time in UTC and then use the SPRegionalSettings.GlobalTimeZoneSettings[].UTCToLocalTime to convert the time to the appropriate time.

So for a date object like 26-FEB-08 16:56 GMT

Simply myDT=DateTime.Parse(“26-FEB-08 16:56 GMT”);
myUniversalDT=myDT.ToUniversalTime();
string estTime=SPRegionalSettings.GlobalTimeZones[14].UTCToLocalTime(myUniversalDT).ToString();

string gmtTime=SPRegionalSettings.GlobalTimeZones[28].UTCToLocalTime(myUniversalDT).ToString();

So there you go, this uses out of the box Sharepoint 3.0 functionality to convert UTC times to EST(14) and GMT(28) obviously this could be expanded to for loop through the objects and then you wouldn’t need to hard code the indexes.

Creating Site Collections and Groups

Ok, so one of the jobs I needed to do was automatically create a Site Collection and then create the members, owners and visitors groups.

The first job is to get hold of the web application

SPWebApplication spWA= SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri(http://mySite));

Next you can use the Sites collection to create the appropriate Site Collection
The new site collections URL can either be in the format mySiteCollection or managedpath/mySiteCollection

int32 lcid=1033;
string template="STS#2" //Get the one you want here
SPSite spS=spWA.Sites.Add(url,"SiteName","SiteDescription",lcid,template,"\\domain\ownerloginname","Owner Name", myemail@here.com)
There are a number of Add methods allowing you to configure owners, secondary owners, and config databases.  Full list here

Once you have done this you will need to add the groups.
This is quite straight forward using the new site collections rootweb property and inturn the SiteGrpups collection

SPWeb spW=spS.rootWeb;

The trick now is to add the group.  The issue here is that you will need an SPMember object which is either SPGroup or SPUser for the owner object.
The problem I encountered is that unless the user is part of the Root Web then they can’t be added as a Group owner.  The group will half create and the API will not throw an Exception.  What you will end up with is a Link in the Site Groups area of teh Site Collection, that errors when clicked. Also the SiteGroups count property will not reflect the new group, but you will not be able to add a group with the same name without receiving a name already exists exception

There are several ways to get a user object.  One involves a straight spW.SiteUsers.Add(…… lots of data)

the other uses the Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Utility and generates a Contact, then uses this to get the actual user object. 

Contact contact=Contact.FromName(userloginname,spW);
if(contact.PrincipalID < 0){
     //this actually adds the user to the site collection users list
     SPPrincipal p=contact.GetPrincipal(spW);
}
SPUser owner=spW.SiteUsers[contact.LoginName];
spW.SiteGroups.Add(spW.Title + " Owners",owner,null,"This is the default owners group")
SPGroup grpOwner=spW.SiteGroups[spW.Title + " Owners"];
spW.AssociatedOwnerGroup=grpOwner
//Repeat for other groups

Finally set the group permissions

SPRoleDefinitionCollection roleDef=spW.RoleDefinitions;
SPRoleAssignmentCollection roleAssigns=spW.RoleAssignments;
SPRoleAssignment roleAssign = new SPRoleAssignment(grpOwner);
SPRoleDefinitionBindingCollection definitions=roleAssign.RoleDefinitionBindings;
definitions.Add(roleDef["Full Control"]); //Could be Contribute or Read
roleAssigns.Add(roleAssign);
//Repeat for other groups
spW.Update();