Editing a webpart in Sharepoint 2010

Question

I feel like there is something that I am missing here. It may be a gap in my Sharepoint 2010 knowledge (which has been developped via trial and error).

I have a webpart that has some old information on it and that I want to edit. I feel like it should be easy to find in sharepoint designer by scanning through 'All Files', but it doesn't seem to be in there. When in a page layout I can find the webpart and use it, I just can't find the actual source code. Recently, I discovered the Web Part Gallery in site settings, I found the web part I was looking for, opened in file explorer, and then opened the web part in question. However, this seems to be just another refrence to the file I am looking for because it just consists of some metadata such as TypeName, Title, and Description.

Just to clarify a few things, this webpart works fine currently. When on the website you can click through, enter information, the webpart searches a database, etc. The problem is that the information is old and I cannot find the source file for the life of me. All I want is the ability to access the source code, be it in sharepoint designer, or notepad/dreamweaver, etc.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

If you have a wsp file for the webpart. you can download it from webpart gallery then Make a copy of that file and name it original so as you will have an extra copy.

Then with another copy rename the extension from .wsp to .cab. It will make it a rar file and then you can open the file contents in visual studio and see the contents of the webpart.

If you want to make any change you can simply create a new webpart project in visual studio make the exact structure in the new project as you can see in the old one and copy the contents and change whatever you require to in new project files and publish a new .wsp file and use it in you website.