Harmjan Greving’s Blog

When you make a mistype in the Search box. SharePoint is giving a message “did you mean:” or “bedoelde u:” for a dutch site collection. These suggestions are given in the first occurrence of the browser languages. Very strange from Microsoft to use the browser language for this. Imagine that you have the first browser language set to en-us and you search in a dutch site collection for ’succes’:

Then SharePoint comes with the following message: “Bedoelde u? Success”. So be aware for this strange behaviour!

When you have an english installation of SharePoint and you install the language packs (wss en sharepoint) for example the dutch language. You get the possibility to create dutch site collections. Sometimes when you create a dutch site collection you get errors with search. I didn’t see the searchscope dropdown but only the words ‘All sites’. When I searched for something I got the following javascript error:
‘options is leeg of geen object’.

The reason for this is that I couldn’t select a searchscope because they were not available. So I visited the  Scopes at the site collection level here:
http://SITE_COLLECTION/_layouts/viewscopes.aspx?mode=site

There I saw that the scope display groups has an english title. English titles in a dutch site collection? That is strange so I googled and found the following:
http://patrikluca.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-sites-search-scopes-missing-in.html

After reading this I renamed the scope display groups into:
Vervolgkeuzelijst voor zoeken
and
Geavanceerd zoeken

After this change the scopes dropdown is shown and search will work!

I downloaded the Web.config modification manager for SharePoint written by Vincent Rothwell from:
http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/03/24/web-config-modification-manager-for-sharepoint.aspx

It is a nice add-in for the central admin. The tool manages all the web.config modifications that are done with the SPWebConfigModification class.

For our customer I need some more functionality like:
- adding modifications with the type EnsureSection;
- updating the current modifications;
- display the active modifications (the latest modification with the highest sequence);
- fix that the tool also works in complex farm scenario’s:
            SPFarm.Local.Services.GetValue<SPWebService>().ApplyWebConfigModifications();
changed that into:
            oApp.Farm.Services.GetValue<SPWebService>().ApplyWebConfigModifications();
(Because Local.Services can not access the other machines? I read about this somewhere on the internet)

Here you can download my update of the webconfig.aspx. Simply add the file to the following folder:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN

This folder contains the application pages for the central admin. You can visit the page easily by visiting the following url: http://CENTRALADMIN:PORT/_admin/webconfig.aspx

Vincent Rothwell has also a version with a Solution installer (by Lars Fastrup) with a Custom Action that adds the file to the Central Administration > Application Management page.

Hope this helps you with controlling the web.config modifications.