Monday, February 06, 2006

ReGhost.NET - A Ghost Hunter Alternative for the Desktop

Sharepoint uses a feature called "ghosting":

"As everyone knows, all pages within SharePoint are stored in the database. This effectively means that for each document, you will find a row in the docs table for that document. The actual file is stored in the Content column. This is true for all files. However, there is one exception - some .aspx pages don’t actually have their content stored in the database. Instead, these pages reference files which exist on the server’s file system. These pages are considered ghosted pages."
(http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=4)

Once a page has become unghosted, getting it back to a ghosted state is very difficult.
  • How can you tell if a page is ghosted or unghosted? Quite simply – you can’t.
    There is no way to determine the state of your page. Unfortunately, this functionality simply didn’t make its way into the product. In an ideal world, you would never need to know if a page is ghosted or not. However, we don’t live in an ideal world.
  • Is it possible to “reset” an unghosted page to its original ghosted state? No.
    This ties into the previous answer. Straight out of the box, there is no way to return a page to its original ghosted state.
(http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=5)

But now there is a solution for this problem!! Matthew Cosier has created a tool called ReGhost.NET which is able to reghost a unghosted page. This marvellous tool is available for download at: http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=6eff7d8a-92ee-4525-a625-b592bb9d0c95

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