Welcome back friends! If you somehow made it here by accident then might I suggest you check out
Part 1 and
Part 2 before proceeding. I'll wait for you to finish.
All done? Excellent! I know at the end of part 2 I said we would talk about how to make controls disappear from your forms on demand but I'm actually going to take a time-out and fulfill a request from one of my co-workers. So, may I present to you: how to add single instance pickers and list pickers to your custom forms!
Single Instance Picker
First, you have to add the necessary assembly as a reference to your project and map a namespace in your XAML to use it. The file you need is Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.UI.SMControls. The reference would look like this:
Then you create a SingleInstancePicker object like so:
Now, if you were to stop there you would notice your single instance picker would default to the base "Configuration Item" class - probably not what you want. In order to limit the picker to the class you want you need to go find its
ManagedTypeId. To do this you need to do a little querying of the CMDB in SQL. Proceed forthwith to the SQL server your CMDB resides on, open SQL Server Management Studio, open a new query window, and run this query:
use servicemanager
select * from dbo.managedtype
order by TypeName
This will return a list of every class in the CMDB. Find the one you want and copy the ManagedTypeId. Now - back to your XAML! You need to add a property to your SingleInstancePicker declaration to reference that ManagedTypeID like so:
Success! Now, on to.
List Pickers
This is a very similar process to Single Instance Pickers. You need to add the same assembly and reference as above. You also need to do a little SQL querying to find the EnumTypeId of the enum (list) you want your picker to reference. The query you want to use is:
use servicemanager
select * from enumtype
order by EnumTypeName
This will return every enum AND enum item in the database. Find the base of the enum you want to use and copy its EnumTypeId. For example, if you wanted to reference the Activity Priority list you would use the highlighted EnumTypeId as seen below.
In your XAML, the code would look like so:
And there you have it - List Pickers and Single Instance Pickers! Now back to our regularly scheduled program.