STSADM

I thought I was done documenting my audience related STSADM commands and then I realized that I had completely forgotten one. The first audience related command I had created was to enable audience targeting on a list – I called it gl-listaudiencetargeting.

In an effort to wrap up my audience related STSADM commands I created a command that allows me to set the audience compilation schedule via STSADM. I had to do some disassembling to figure out how to do this and it turned out that the code was virtually identical to what I had done for the gl-setuserprofileimportschedule command.

The project that I’m currently on has a test environment in which many configurations were made to the user profile properties settings. I just began the process of building out their production environment and was faced with a minor issue – how do I get all the settings that have been applied to the test environments profile properties migrated to the production environment in a reliable and repeatable way?

Using the commands I’ve created so far you can now create audiences, add rules, and display those rules all via STSADM. If you’re like me and you do a lot of testing of this stuff before you push out the final version then you’ll want a way to also easily delete audiences that you’ve created.

Okay, so you’ve created your audience and used my gl-addaudiencerule command to add some complex rules to the audience. Three months later you’ve forgotten what those rules are and need to see them again – unfortunately you can’t do that via the browser, so what do you do?

Sometimes when I’m working on a new Feature I find it easier to take certain snippets that I need to test and pull them out into custom STSADM commands. This enables me to quickly and easily test the core code and without having to go through all the deployment steps.

If you read my last post, Creating Audiences via STSADM, then you know that I’ve been working on a project which requires me to be able to script out the creation of audiences via STSADM.

The project that I’m currently working has a need to create a ton of audiences representing divisions, departments, locations, etc. We wanted to be able to include the creation of these audiences in our install script so that we easily recreate the audiences in various environments.

I had a requirement recently to show a view of a list from a child site on the page of a parent site. You can of course do this easily with a content query web part and then just manipulate the XSL to get the output to look the way you want but what if you want to be able to use the out of the box List View Web Part so that you get the toolbar and all the other stuff that the web part provides?

I was chatting with my buddy and fellow MVP, Todd Klindt, the other day and he was asking if I had a custom command that would allow him to quickly delete all the users added to a site collection.