Sandboxed Solutions versus Farm Solutions

Sandboxed Solutions versus Farm Solutions

Why Sandbox came into Existence?

Each server in the farm can have multiple web applications running on it. A web application can in turn have one or more site collections, and a site collection has one or more sites. Farm solutions can impact the entire SharePoint system and are available to all site collections and sites in the farm. This is sometimes desirable, but sometimes can have undesired effects because a farm solution that is misbehaving can impact all sites and site collections in the system.

• Sandboxed solutions are deployed at the site collection level rather than the farm level, so this lets you isolate a solution so it is only available to one site collection within the farm.
• Sandboxed solutions also run in a separate process from the main SharePoint IIS web application
• Process and the separate process is throttled and monitored with quotas to protect the SharePoint site from becoming unresponsive due to a misbehaving sandboxed solution.
• It is worth mentioning that sandboxed solutions solve an organizational problem as well—in many organizations it is difficult to get permission to install a farm solution because of the possible impact that could have on the SharePoint system. System administrators in charge of running a Share-Point site have been reluctant in the past to allow custom solutions to run on their sites. With the advent of SharePoint 2010, there is now a robust system in place to monitor and throttle these custom solutions so that system administrators don’t have to worry about a custom solution bringing the entire SharePoint site down.

If all good with Sandbox then, why we require Farm Solution?

There are restrictions on the kinds of solutions you can build with a sandboxed solution.

The most significant restrictions disallow creation of

• application pages
• visual web parts
• code-based workflows with a sandboxed solution.

So in the end, the choice between sandboxed and farm solutions should come down to whether or not you need to create an application page or a workflow with code in it. For these kinds of solutions, you should pick a farm solution. For all other solutions, pick a sandboxed solution. The only other reason to use a farm solution over a sandboxed solution is if you really have some code that needs to run at the web application or farm level, perhaps because it needs to interact with or move data between multiple site collections. In this case, you would create a farm solution as well.