Using Web ADF controls in an ASP.NET Web Part and SharePoint 2007

http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgisserver/archive/2008/02/27/Using-Web-ADF-controls-in-an-ASP.NET-Web-Part-and-SharePoint-2007.aspx

On to working with SharePoint - Building a portal site which uses Web Parts can be time consuming; integrating the site into other enterprise systems can be difficult and inefficient; and lastly, managing the site can be overly complex and convoluted. In an attempt to manage enterprise content, intelligence and search systems effectively, Microsoft has created Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or MOSS for short. MOSS is good for what it claims to do (be an all encompassing enterprise system for sharing information), but it is not simple. Like many software products, more capability means greater complexity. One option for customizing the presentation of content and providing access to business logic is developing custom ASP.NET Web Parts and deploying them on a SharePoint server. An ASP.NET Web Part can be deployed relatively easily with SharePoint 2007. The SharePoint SDK includes a WebPart class which derives from the ASP.NET WebPart. The SharePoint WebPart class offers a few benefits, such as cross-page and non-WebPart connections, which primarily facilitate backward compatibility with SharePoint 2003. For more information on Web Part development with SharePoint 2007, Scott Guthrie provides a bevy of valuable information and links in his blog post Writing Custom WebParts for SharePoint 2007. You can use Sahil Malik’s walkthrough at the beginning of the post to get started creating a custom ASP.NET Web Part.

There are a few issues to consider when deploying a Web Part that contains Web ADF controls in

SharePoint 2007:

SharePoint 2007 was designed to function using the full page postback pattern. As a result, tools in a Web ADF Toolbar may need to trigger a full postback within a custom Web Part to communicate with other parts in the page. Unfortunately the postback event never gets to the tool, so some additional code is required to raise the post back event to the correct control (e.g. Map). See the sample code for more details.

The SharePoint 2007 server may not have session state enabled, which is necessary for the Web ADF controls to function. If not enabled, SharePoint will return a fairly ambiguous error when attempting to add your custom Web Part to the SharePoint server.

The 9.3 Web ADF will resolve many of the limitations and issues encountered when working with 9.2 Web ADF controls in a Web Part. 9.3 Web ADF controls will be fully supported for use in custom user and composite controls, both of which may be deployed as a Web Part. Multiple Web Parts containing multiple Web ADF controls can function within the same application. The use of ESRIWebADFHiddenFields will be reduced if not removed. And full postbacks initiated by toolbar items will be supported internally.