Displaying document titles as links.

On a recent project I had to migrate a large number of documents from a legacy system into SharePoint. In the old system users to choose what text would be displayed as the link. In most cases users chose not to use the actual file name as the link text.

The Problem

In SharePoint users don’t have as much control of what gets displayed. There is a ‘Title’ field but it can’t be used in a calculated column and on the standard document library it is not a required field.

Technically the file name could be used but this could lead to very long file names with spaces and special characters that could cause problems by forcing the page to scroll as well as creating some REALLY long URLs.

Depending on the type of document the actual file name may be irrelevant to the use while the title would be more helpful. For instance a in document library of meeting minutes the file names could just be the date of the meeting for example (12_03_2009.docx). The document title could be used to contain not only the date but other relevant information about the meeting like who attended or important issues that were discussed. Additionally the title field can support special characters and spaces that could be a problem in file names.

Read the rest of this entry »

CSS-Tricks AnythingSlider in SharePoint

Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks built this really cool jQuery plugin that creates a content slider that will support any regular HTML in the slides. This is cool because many sliders I have used had limitations on what could be on the slides and did not offer many of the featuers the AnythingSlider does.

AnythingSlider in SharePoint

Setup

To get this working in SharePoint you will need to make sure you have a reference to jQuery in the page somewhere as well as a list for the slider to read from. For my example I am using an out of the box annoucements list.  You will also need the files for the plugin download the anythingSlider plugin from css-tricks.com.

• In SharePoint Designer add a dataview webpart to the page with any field from your annoucements list.
• Switch to code view and find the first <xsl> tag. It should be right after the closing <DatasSources> tag.
• Right click on the tag and choose “Select Tag”. Press delete, don’t worry we will be adding in our own xsl.

• Paste the following xsl into the page where you deleted the code.

Read the rest of this entry »

Updating the #SharePoint People Picker

So I was working with a friend on a custom SharePoint list. When users create a new item certain fields needed to automatically populate with information from their profile. We ran into issues when trying to populate the people picker.

Scripts like SPFF can be used to accomplish this but we needed something else because we wanted to read in the current user’s information from the SharePoint web service. Additionally we wanted to avoid passing information using the query string because users would be able to access the form through multiple links.

People Picker

Read the rest of this entry »