SharePoint 2010 Workflow Interview Questions

Q. What is a workflow?
Ans. Workflows are the way an organization functions, a series of actions that correspond to a work process, such as the process for purchase orders.SharePoint 2010 helps you automate these workflows, thereby increasing the efficiency and productivity of the organization.

Q. What are the types of workflow that you can design in SharePoint 2010.
Ans. you can design List Workflows, Reusable List Workflows and Site workflows using SharePoint designer 2010.

Q. What Reusable List Workflows and Site workflows ?
Ans.
Reusable List Workflows -
You can create a reusable list workflow (reusable workflow) in the top-level site in the site collection, and that workflow can be made globally reusable — meaning that the workflow can be associated to any list, library, or content type in the site collection. You can also create a reusable workflow in any subsite in the site collection; this workflow is available for reuse in that particular subsite.

Site workflows - A site workflow is associated to a site — not to a list, library, or content type. So unlike most workflows, a site workflow is not running on a specific list item. Because of this, many of the actions that are available for items not available for site workflows.

Q. Can you modify the Out-of-Box workflows in SharePoint 2010 ?
Ans. In SharePoint 2010, you have an option to customize the Out-of-Box workflows. The four most popular workflows in SharePoint Server 2007 — the Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures, Publishing Approval workflows — have been completely rebuilt as declarative reusable workflows, meaning that they are now fully customizable in SharePoint Designer 2010.

Q. What are events, actions, conditions and steps?
Ans. Lets look at this one by one.

Events - An event is what starts or initiates a workflow. Events can also be used to manage the timing of actions within a workflow, such as waiting for the status of an item to change. There are three events that can start a workflow:
* An item is created.
* An item is changed.
* A workflow participant clicks a start button on the SharePoint site.

Actions – An action is the most basic unit of work in a workflow. SharePoint Designer 2010 provides a set of ready-made, reusable actions for you to incorporate into your workflow.
For example, your workflow can:
* Create, copy, change, or delete list items (including documents).
* Check items in or out.
* Send an e-mail message.

Conditions - When you design a workflow, you can use the workflow editor to create rules that apply conditional logic to SharePoint sites, lists, items and content types. A rule establishes a condition where the workflow performs the associated action only if that condition is true. For example, you can create a rule where the workflow sends a reviewer an e-mail message only if an item is created by a specific person.

Q. What are Parallel and Serial actions ?
Ans. When you have more than one action associated with a condition, the actions can be set up to run at the same time (parallel) or one after another (serial), the default.

Q. What are the Types of forms associated with the workflow ?
Ans. With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create three types of workflow forms:
Initiation form – An initiation form gathers information from the workflow participant when they start the workflow. It is automatically generated when you create the workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010. Initiation forms are displayed to users when they manually start a workflow on a given SharePoint item. With an initiation form, users can specify additional parameters or information about the workflow as it applies to the given SharePoint item.

Task form – A custom task form allows workflow participants to interact with tasks in the Tasks list specified for the workflow. With the Custom Task Wizard, you can easily create custom form fields and add them to a custom task form. When you finish designing the workflow, SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generates the InfoPath or ASP.NET forms for your custom tasks.

Reusable workflow – association form – A reusable workflow, by default, only provides the fields common to all items, such as Created and Modified by. This is because a reusable workflow isn’t by default associated with a list, library, or content type. An association form enables you to associate fields with a reusable workflow so that the fields will be available when you design and run the workflow.

Q. When are these forms get created ? And how do you customize it ?
Ans. SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generates the forms, but you can customize them by going to the settings page for the workflow, in the Forms section, click the form you want to customize. Workflow forms are either InfoPath or ASP.NET pages. They are stored on the SharePoint site with the workflow source files.

SharePoint 2010 developer interview questions and answers

Questions are specific to SharePoint 2010 and about the new features introduced in SharePoint 2010.
Q. How will you deploy files such as Css, js in SharePoint 2010?
Ans. The most preferable way to deploy files in SharePoint is by using the solution package. In SharePoint 2010 you can create an empty project with VS 2010 and then add a new SharePoint Mapped folder in it. This will give the desired location in 14 hive where you can then add a file to deploy.

Q. Can you display a page as a modal dialog?
Ans. Yes, any page can be displayed as modal dialog. A Modal dialog takes options as a parameter and we can speciy the url for any page usually saved in _layouts.

Q. Can you display the modal dialog from a webpart?
Ans. Yes a modal dialog can be displayed from within a webpart code since its a JavaScript block that can be registered on the page.

Q. What is difference between an Application page and a Custom aspx page in SharePoint 2010. If you have to deploy a page with some code in it which one would you prefer?
Ans.
Application Page – You would typically use an applictaion page when you need some content that is merged with SharePoint master page. A master page enables application pages to share the same appearance and behavior as other pages on a site. Application page generally gets deployed in _layouts and inhertirs the look and feel of the site that you are using.
A Custom .net aspx page on the other hand would need content and master page tags in your page to make it inherit the look and feel of the site.
I would prefer deploying an application page with code as it is much easier and has built-in templates available in VS 2010.

Q. What are Projected Fields in SPQuery and when would you use that?
Ans. In SharePoint 2010, Referential integrity can now be implemented using Lookup columns. Joins and ProjectedFields properties of SPQuery were introduced to facilitate this. Projected Fields are the fields which you can access when a list is joined by a lookup solumns. These are additional columns from a parent lookup column list.

Q. What is WebProvisioned event receiver and when would you use that?
Ans. WebProvisioned event receiver is fired after the site has been created and is fully provisioned(asynchronous). For e.g. if you want to update the site title of logo after its been created or if you want to add a new list\library after the out-of-box site has been created you can use the WebProvisioned event handler.


Q. How does Client object model works ?
Ans. When we use SharePoint client API’s to perform a specific task, the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model bundles up these uses of the API into XML and sends it to the server that runs SharePoint Foundation. The server receives this request, and makes appropriate calls into the object model on the server, collects the responses, forms them into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and sends that JSON back to the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model. The client object model parses the JSON and presents the results to the application as .NET Framework objects (or ECMAScript objects for ECMAScript).


Q. Why would you use LINQ over CAML for data retrieval?
Ans. Unlike CAML, with LINQ to SharePoint provider, you are working with strongly typed list item objects. For example, an item in the Announcements list is an object of type Announcement and an item on a Tasks list is an object of type Task. You can then enumerate the objects and get the properties for your use. Also, you can use LINQ syntax and the LINQ keywords built into C# and VB for LINQ queries.

Q. Can we use our custom master page with the application pages in SharePoint 2010 ?
Ans. With 2010, you can now set whether the pages under _Layouts use the same Master Page as the rest of your site. You can enable or disable this functionality through the web application settings in Central Administration. This however, is not applicable to your custom application pages. If you want your custom applictaion page to inherit the site master page you must derive it from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase class.

Q. What are WebTemplates and Site Definitions ?
Ans. Site definitions consist primarily of multiple XML and ASPX files stored on a front-end Web server in folders under the %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates directory.
Custom Web templates on the other hand, are stored in the database, and are created using an existing site, with or without its specific content, as a model. This provides a means for reusing sites that you have customized.In some ways, Web templates continue to depend, throughout their lifecycle, on the site definition that is their ultimate foundation.

Q. How do you write to SharePoint ULS logs in 2010 ?
Ans. In SharePoint Foundation, ULS exposes configurable settings in two ways, through the – Object model and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. For writing to SharePoint ULS logs developers can can use Diagnostics Service, which will make the customized categories viewable in the administrative UI for our errors.
or they can use the number of cmdlets available for accessing ULS logs using powershell. Some of the cmdlets are Get-SPDiagnosticConfig ,Get-SPLogEvent etc.


Q. What has Changed in SharePoint 2010 Object model?
Ans. Microsoft has replaced the “12 hive” structure that we had in SharePoint 2007 with “14 Hive” structure in 2010.
It has apparently added four new folders to its hive.
The Folders are :
* Policy
* UserCode
* WebClients
* WebServices

Q. What are the Disadvantages of Using LINQ in your Code?
Ans. LINQ translates the LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries thus adding an extra step for retrieving the items.

Q. What is different with SharePoint 2010 workflows ?
Ans. Some of the additions in workflow model are :
1. SharePoint 2010 workflows are build upon the the workflow engine provide .Net Framework 3.5.
2. In addition to the SharePoint lists we can now create workflows for SharePoint sites as well.
3. SharePoint Designer 2010 also has a new graphical workflow designer for designing workflows and deploying them directly to SharePoint.
4. Another Improvement in SharePoint Designer 2010 is that it now allows you to edit the out-of-the-box workflows that come with SharePoint.

Backup Restore stsadm command to Move a Site Collection in SharePoint

The Backup\Restore stsadm command is one of the best options available to move a site collection.
Here are some of the scenarios I use it for -

1. For moving a Site Collection from one Content database to another.

2. For moving a Site Collection with it’s actual Content, that means leaving behind the heavy Audit Logs, Workflow history list etc.

3. The only drawback for using this stsadm command is that before you restore, the original Site Collection has to be deleted.This can however, easily be overcome (if looking for Foll proof plan) by simply detaching the database that contains the original site and then restoring the backup under a same web app. This will prevent you to loose the original site and if the restore fails, you can easily go back to the original state of the site by re-attaching the Content database that you detached.

4. Lastly, with Backup\Restore stsadm command all SharePoint Designer Workflows gets moved without any issues.