Dave Cavins » davecavins

Block multi-document uploads in #SharePoint

davecavins — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:50:59 +0000

In SharePoint 2007 when a document library has required columns for metadata or other information the user is prompted to complete the information when a new document is added. However if the user chooses the ‘Upload Multiple Files” option they are not required to populate required columns. After the files are load and a user goes in to edit they will be prompted to fill in the information.

In some cases this may not be an issue but if the library has workflows triggered by column values or views sorted or filtered based on those metadata columns there could be problems. So of course there is use training that can be done to ensure documents are always properly populated with metadata but sometimes that is not enough.

Ricky Deleyos showed me how to with some simple CSS hide the “Upload Multiple Documents” link on Upload.aspx.

.ms-splitbuttondropdown, #ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_ctl01_ctl02_UploadMultipleLink { display: none !important;}

Because Upload.aspx is called from the 12 hive and not from the local site this code needs to be added to your declared CSS and not just referenced using a CEWP or other method. This will hide the link for all libraries on the site using the declared CSS.

There are other ways to solve this problem

These methods all require editing the page itself which can be risky or even impossible given your environment. Especially in large environments where user requirements can vary greatly its best not to make changes that will affect everyone. It’s best to implement solutions that can be isolated to impact only the site or area where they are needed.

Some thoughts on #SharePoint Adoption

davecavins — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:00:50 +0000

SharePoint is a powerful tool for collaboration and information sharing. Working on documents, tracking issues, tasks and projects can all be made easier using the tool. In many demos I have seen SharePoint can be used as a complete solution for managing the complete life-cycle of a business process. It all seems so great.

In the real world of actual organizations (at least in my experience) not everyone is willing or interested in using SharePoint. There are ways to integrate external applications with SharePoint that can create very powerful solutions but in some cases the issues is more than just connecting to other data sources. There are cases where you just need to pull information out of SharePoint for a report to management or for a meeting where you will not have access to your SharePoint site.

This is one place where things could be made easier. SharePoint does allow users to export content to excel or access for manipulation but in 2007 there was not a very good print view. For instance, if I was to run a search and needed to print the results or manipulate them to generate a report there is not an easy way of doing so. There are some add-ons you can install to make the process easier such as this one from ZenPo Software Innovations.

I think this issue can in some cases help hinder adoption. Users are comfortable with Excel, Word and Outlook and expect to easily transfer information between them. When users are new to SharePoint it’s can be daunting when they hear they are supposed to do all their work in this new tool.

There are several simple ways to help ease the transition.

Don’t just focus on SharePoint features in training, also show the user how they can easily transition information from SharePoint into tools they are more comfortable
Exporting to Excel, using the data sheet view to copy/paste from Excel and connecting lists to outlook are all very useful features that can make using SharePoint far more palatable for a novice user.

Simple Search Box with Radio Buttons

davecavins — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:26:43 +0000

So lets say you want users to be able to selectively search content from 3 (or more) different lists (The lists may or may not be on the same site). Out of the Box there is not an easy way to do this.

Having the user browse to each list or library and search it specifically
Use the site wide search which will return results from the whole site.

You could setup search scopes for each list but if you manage a large number of sites this could become a lot of work to maintain.

So the plan is to build one search box with radio buttons that will let you choose what list or scope you want to query. Here is how I did it.

The HTML

Here is the basci HTML I used. I have a container div I use for styling, the input box, 3 radio buttons, and a search link. Things to notice:

On the container div I have included javascript to call a function named ‘submitSearch’ if the user presses the enter key. See line 1.
Instead of a submit button I am using a regular link that calls the same function as above.

All Tasks Discussions

Search

JavaScript

Because we cannot include an actual form in the page and I did not want to use a page viewer web part for this solution we will use JavaScript to submit the values from the search box. I am using jQuery as usual. To keep it simple the function checks the value of the selected radio button, if it is the url of the current site the search is run using the ‘This Site’ scope. Otherwise the search uses the scope that is defined by the value of the radio button and the ‘This List’ scope.

See the comments in the code for more information.

// include jquery

Using the query string

Like most search engines SharePoint uses the query string to pass the information you want to search for. A quick look at the search results page tells us what we need to send in order to get the results we need. The rest is just simple JavaScript. In the code above you can see how I built the query string using the various elements.

Disceting the Query String

All together now

All Tasks Discussions

Search Results

In the code above you will notice I am passing the search term to a page called search.aspx. This is a page I created by adding the search web parts. I used my own search results page because I wanted to have control of the look and feel. You could also send the results to a search center site or the out of the box search page (_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx), this might be different in 2010.

Useful Resouces

#SharePoint Designer Custom Activities Risky?

davecavins — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:21:48 +0000

SPD Custom Activities are an add-on many people use because they add new custom activities and conditions that can be used in SharePoint Design workflows. SPD Custom Activities give designers the ability to create more complex and powerful workflows without having to know code or use Visual Studio for development. Check out a list of the activities and descriptions here.

These activities have many benefits for users including:

Make the automation of business processes easier
Easier to build complex applications without the help of a (costly) developer.
More power in the hands of the user
Can quickly prototype, test and deliver applications
Easier to manage and make changes to applications in production

On the other hand I feel it is important to consider the SPD Custom Activities from a governance and management standpoint. If you are responsible for managing and supporting the SharePoint environment its important to consider not only how these types of solutions will help the user but how will they affect the stability of your environment?

I will discuss a few of the main risks I discovered while researching SPD Custom Activities along with Gabe Hilado of Zenpo Software.

Access

In order to use the custom activities you need SharePoint Designer installed on your workstation and you need at least site owner permissions. Because SharePoint designer is now free any user can get it installed and with the right permissions begin building workflows. With the custom activities it is easier to build more complex workflows. Simple mistakes in the workflow could potentially lead to performance issues (I’ll explain later). It may be best to establish some sort of training for users before they are given access to SharePoint Designer to ensure they have some understanding of workflow best practices. This point applies if you have SPD Custom Activities installed or not even the OOTB workflows can create issues.

Proper Development Practices

Developing workflows in SharePoint Designer is relatively easy and does not require the creator to follow any specific process. Users can easily setup a mission critical application in SharePoint within a few days or weeks. This can make it difficult to support your SharePoint users, here is why. When users can develop complex applications without following SDLC best practices (dev – test – production) it’s easy to have problems in your SharePoint environment without even knowing about them. Additionally as the system owner you may not even know about these applications and their support requirements. When something breaks or the developer leaves how can you support/repair something that was not properly documented or tested. As mentioned earlier these issues are not all specific to SPD custom activities but because of its power can have a larger impact.

Potentially Broad Impact

Workflows are used to automate processes involving large number of items, for processes. If the process only involved a few items users would do it manually through the interface. Poorly-designed automated workflows have the potential to affect large number of items very quickly. SPD Custom Activities adds the ability for these workflows to not only edit permission but also trigger other workflows. When one workflow can start another workflow it’s easy to create a loop that could affect many items very quickly and be hard to troubleshoot as an outsider.

Performance

SharePoint can experience performance degradation with a large number of unique security scopes in lists
Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2420771

According to article

“When more than 1,000 security scopes are created for folders or documents in a list, there’s a significant performance degradation in SharePoint operations that badly affects end users operations(rendering content) as well as SharePoint activities like indexing SharePoint Content. After the number of unique security scopes exceeds1,000 per list, SharePoint uses a code path that requires additional SQL round trips to analyze the scopes before rendering a view. When there are 1000 or fewer scopes, only one round trip is required.”

This mainly related to the permissions related activities in SPD Custom Activities. Its true that a user could run into the same problem by manually breaking permissions on many items through the interface however this is unlikely to happen. If a workflow is built improperly and leaves permissions disinherited the process becomes automated. Automating a bad practice is probably not a good idea.

Conclusion

By no means is this post meant to say that SPD custom activities are bad or should not be used. I think they are very useful and can be very helpful when used properly. It’s important to plan ahead and ensure the proper governance is in place to prevent issues like those mentioned above. If you don’t the time or resources to put some sort of governance in place to protect your farm it may be best to do custom workflow development in Visual Studio where it can be properly tested and packaged.

Useful Resources

Custom Activities in 2010

Zoomable Photo Grid

davecavins — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:05:54 +0000

I started on this post back in July and I am just getting around to publishing it.

The out of the box SharePoint image library is nice and offers lots of options for viewing the images. However as more and more sites begin to use jQuery plugins and other methods for presentation the SharePoint views seem limited at best.

A few weeks ago while doing some random browsing I found this photo grid plugin and decided to try to implement it in SharePoint, here is how I did it.

Add links and scripts to the page


  
/* Setup.js is where you can change settings for the plugin*/

XSL Code

This is the easy part. Each image is wrapped in an

tag. The unordered list has an id of “pg” that is used to call the script. The caption for each item is wraped in a

tag. The rest is handled by javascript.



http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="xsl msxsl ddwrt" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal">
 
 
      '
      0
      http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp" xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20" xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer" xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls">
       
 
      
       BulTitl
       
       
        
         
        
       
      
      
       
       
        
       
      
      
  
   {@Title}" />
   {@Title}

I had some issues with the caption not displaying propely in IE7 but I did not have the time to find a fix. Its always best to resize your images before you load them into SharePoint but if for some reason you don’t the plugin forces them to be the right size so vertical images may be stretched. Overall this solution would only work well in specific situations that require this type of functionality. If you have questions feel free to comment.

Resources

Zoomable Photo Grid http://www.gethifi.com/demos/jphotogrid
jQuery

#BCP2010 Part 1

davecavins — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:00:59 +0000

I meant to post this last week during the conference but I was too busy or too tired to do so.

So the conference started off with an hour long keynote presentation that began with short a welcome from Bill English from Mindsharp. The welcome was follow by an hour long advertisement for Microsoft’s SharePoint MCM program. Various MCM’s came up and talked about how great the program is and how much smarter they are as a result of attending it.

Overall this session was somewhat interesting but for the most part I don’t feel that it really applied to most of the audience of the conference. There are only 24 slots available for the MCM course each quarter and the training is rather expensive ($30k). Needless to say I would not have felt bad if I had come late.

The rest of the day I attended sessions by various presenters mainly focused on the new features in SharePoint 2010. I wish there had been more sessions focused on MOSS 2007 or just general best practices because although the presentations were interesting I know it will be quite some time before I will get to use SP2010 at work.
This was my first conference and it felt good to be able to learn so much from others and talk to people who are working with the same tools. I was glad to see such a diverse group of people including developers, administrators, project managers and other users.

I’ll write more later but right now it’s time to get back to work.

My first #SharePoint Conference #BPC2010

davecavins — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:16:45 +0000

So I am at the Best Practices Conference here in Reston VA. I am going to try to post about what I learn and some of my opinions on the conference as a whole. This is my first time attending a SharePoint Conference so it should be interesting. I hope to learn a lot about both 2007 and 2010.

Most best practices information I have read before has been pretty good but because of the many uses ad types of SharePoint deployments it seems to be very difficult to establish many best practices that will always be true no matter the size or type of your deployment.

A Better Annoucements Ticker

davecavins — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:08:14 +0000

A while back I did a post about how to make a vertical news ticker, in the comments several people pointed out problems with the code so I decided to write a better version of the code. Here it is.

New Ticker

For this ticker I started out with a default Annoucements list. Because I wanted to display a thumbnail for each annoucement I added a signle line of text column called Subtitle and a Picture column called Picture. Here are the columns I used.

Here is the basic structure of the ticker.


« Back	More pictures »

    
      
           
           Title
          
              Subtitle Text
          
        First 200 Characters of the body
       Read more

Below is the xsl code I used to build the ticker.




	
	
				'
				
				
	CurrentDate
				0
				
					
	
				
					Table
					
						 
	« Back
	More pictures »

		
		
			
				
			
			
			
	
				
					
					
						
		
	
		
		
		
		

				
		
		

				
				Read more

If you try to run the page with just this XSL it will give an error. You will also need to add these two lines to the parameter bindings section of your dataview web part. I used these 2 parameters to get the URL of the current page in order to built the ‘read more’ link. This is what I would call a best practice because other wise you would have to hard code the URL to your site which makes it harder for others to use your code.

In addition to this code you will also need to add links to these two files.


/* css file to style the ticker */

Here is the css I used to style my ticker.

/* root element for scrollable */
.vertical {
	/* required settings */
	position:relative;
	overflow:hidden;
	/* vertical scrollers have typically larger height than width */
	height: 665px;
	width: 700px;
	border-top:1px solid #ddd;
}

/* root element for scrollable items */
.items {
	position:absolute;
	/* this time we have very large space for height */
	height:20000em;	margin: 0px;
}

/* single scrollable item */
.item {
	border-bottom:1px solid #85b1ee;
	border-top:1px solid #85b1ee;
	margin:10px 0; padding:15px; font-size:12px;
	height:180px; background:#d6e8ff;
}

/* elements inside single item */
.item img {
	float:left;
	margin-right:20px;
	height:180px;
	width:240px;
	border:5px solid #fff;
}

.item h3 {
	margin:0 0 5px 0;
	font-size:16px;
	color:#4a6499;
	font-weight:normal;
}

.item p a{padding:3px;}

.item p a:hover{ background:#fff; text-decoration:none;}

.item p { padding:3px; margin:5px;}

/* the action buttons above the scrollable */
#actions { width:700px; margin:30px 0 10px 0;}

#actions a {font-size:11px;	cursor:pointer; color:#666;}

#actions a:hover {text-decoration:underline; color:#000;}

.disabled {visibility:hidden;}

.next {float:right;}

Notes

The XSL is setup so that if no thumbnail is provided it will automatically adjust. The same is true if no subtitle is entered. This is done using conditional formating.
Only the first 200 characters of the body are shown. To change this amount you can just change this line of code xsl:value-of select=”substring(@Body,0,200)”.
You do not need the whole jQuery library in order for this to run.

Resources

jQuery Scrollable Plugin
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/scrollable
How to get the Current URL in XSL
http://www.jwc3.net/2008/05/how-to-get-url-in-xsl.html

Switch Themes Without a Page Refresh: Part 2

davecavins — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:50:09 +0000

So in part one of this post we got all the CSS and other theme file we needed to stuck them in a document library.

With JavaScript you can change the CSS file a page uses without requiring a page refresh. I have used this technique many times on non-SharePoint sites but there are some special challenges implementing this in SharePoint. Most of the scripts I have used in the past use the alternate style sheet method as describred by A List Apart here. That method works fine but I had to find another way because I was already using that script to allow users to change the font size. After some research I found this script from CSS Newbie that worked pretty well without using alternate style sheets.

The problem

While the script works just fine on regular HTML pages it cause problems in SharePoint here is why :

 $("link").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));

This line of code basically finds all the linked CSS files in the page and changes thier value to point to the new style sheet you select. This is fine on a site that just uses one CSS file but in SharePoint bad things happen. In most cases we dont want to completely remove the reference to core.css. For most themes many elements don’t need to be changed so we only have to write the CSS to change them and let core.css do the rest. If you remove core.css its like using a global reset (discussed in more detail here) which means you will have to restyle everything. So them point is we want to leave core.css in the page and just add our theme.

To do this I had to make some changes to the master page to create to interface users will use to swap themes.

Edit the Masterpage

Here is the code I added to the masterpage. This can be styled to look however you want and can be added anywhere in the page that makes sense.


	Reset CSS
	Verdant
	Belltown
	Petal

In addition to this we also need to add a link to our css file to the master page. I put it at the end of the head section.

I added a class to the link so that we can use jQuery to target only that css link and change it to match the theme the user selects. Initially I left the href value blank but if you want to apply some default styles you would just add the link to the css file there.

Use jQuery to Swap the CSS

So here is the code I used to swap the stylesheet. The main thing I changed is on lines 7 and 12. I changed the selector so it will only target tags with a class of ‘altStyle’. This allows us to swap themes without breaking the link to core.css.

Resources

You will need jQuery either locally or linked from Google. Just update the link on line 1 as needed.
In the code above you will notice a link to cookie.js, this is the jQjuery cookie plugin that you will need in order to save users’ theme selections. In the code above on line 13 you will see where I create a cookie named css. For testing purposes you can uncomment line 10 to see what the cookie value is on page load. You can download the plugin from here. jQuery Cookie Plugin
You can see the original code I started from in this script from CSS Newbie

Conclusion

While this is a very simple solution it is a quick way to add in some fuctionality that many users want without alot of custom code or requiring the user to navigate to multiple pages. Users like to feel that they have some control over the site (even if its just changing the color). Feel free to post any questions or comments.

Switch Themes Without a Page Refresh: Part 1

davecavins — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:03:26 +0000

Many sites offer the ability for users to change the color and style of the site to fit their preference. SharePoint has this feature to some extend through themes but changing themes is not a very simple process and requires browsing to several pages.

Users need to be able to switch themes and have the setting saved
No page refresh
Should be able to use both out of the box themes and custom themes

So first I needed to get the CSS files and images for the themes I wanted to use. When you assign a theme to a site all the files for the theme are copied to a folder named _themes in the root of the site.

_themes folder

So what I did was assign each theme I wanted to use to the site one at a time. With SharePoint designer I copied the files folders for each theme into a document library called Site Styles. Each folder contains all the resources needed or the theme to work.

Here is what I ended up with

Site Styles Library

If I wanted to create a custom theme I could just add another folder with my custom CSS and images.

This same technique can be used when developing your own custom theme, just copy one that is similar to what you want and use the alternate CSS link on the master page settings page to add it to the site. Inside of the folder for each theme is a file named theme.css. Link to that file and SharePoint will apply the theme to the site.

Alternate CSS URL

Now everything we have done so far is pretty basic and easy to do but we will pull all this together with some simple edits to the master page to complete the solution. In part 2 I’ll explain how we use JavaScript to switch styles and set a cookie to remember the users theme choice.

Improving #SharePoint Forms – Watermarks

davecavins — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:58:59 +0000

So I found this cool jQuery plugin that does watermarks for form inputs. Using watermarks is a good way to help make SharePoint forms easier to use. To test the plugin I started with the new item form from same test list I used in my previous posts.

Watermarks

Prerequisites

jQuery Library referenced in the page
CEWP on the page

Setup

First make sure you reference a copy of the plugin script. I added the link to the section of the page using the method explained in this post.

We also need some css to style the watermarks

The plugin works by finding all the inputs with a class of “watermarked” and using this title attribute as the watermark. So I used jQuery to select the inputs I wanted to watermark and add the “watermarked” class to them.

Here is the code I used.

$("input[title='Author']").addClass('watermarked');
$("input[title='Title']").addClass('watermarked');
$("textarea[title='Body']").addClass('watermarked');

After the inputs have the right class all we need to do is call the plugin script like so

$('.watermarked').each(function() {
  $(this).watermark('watermark', $(this).attr('title'));
});

Thats all. Enjoy.

Anything Slider in SharePoint – Update

davecavins — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:49:05 +0000

Several people have asked how to change the under of items displayed in the slider and how to change the sort order.

Item Limit

To change the number of items displayed use the code below.



	
	
	'
	0
	
		
	
	
		Table

On line 13 change the RowLimit to the number of items you would like to show. For example if you wanted to show 6 items you would change line 13 to this

Sort Order

Changing the sort order can be done through SharePoint Designer once you are using the updated code

Click on the arrow to show the common data view tasks.
Click on ‘Sort and Group’ the second option.
Make changes as needed.

If dont want to do it that way there is another option.

Open the page in SharePoint Designer
In code view find this ‘SharePoint:SPDataSource’ you will need to edit this tag.
Find the SelectCommand and add/edit the OrderBy attibute.
See the code below for an example. (Ordered by Created Date in Ascending order). Its basically a CAML query.


 If you are not sure how to get it all set up look to my previous post on the Anything Slider.  If you have questions please post a comment.


Related posts:
Zoomable Photo Grid
CSS-Tricks AnythingSlider in SharePoint
A Better Annoucements Ticker

Switch List Displays with JQuery and CSS

davecavins — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:58:05 +0000

Sometimes it is useful to allow users to quickly change how data is displayed. Changing the display can make is easier to see patterns or find a specific item you are looking for. With CSS and jQuery we can easily change the way content is displayed and arranged on the page. I got the idea for this post from here

Switch views using CSS and jQuery

Basically by changing the class assigned to a div wrapping the content we are able to change the way things are laid out and hide what we don’t need. Here how I set it up in SharePoint.

I started with a standard Image library and added some images of one of my bikes. I filled in the title and description for each item. You can use this same technique on other types of lists.
Next I created a page and displayed the list in a dataview web part
I edited the XSL to show the items in an unordered list with a class of ‘display’. Inside of each
I used various tags and classes to style the images and descriptions.
```
	
	
	
	
		
	
	
```

Before the opening




Switch Display /* link to trigger the switch */

Then I wrote some css to style the list differently based on the class of the

Below is the xsl and the CSS I used.

XSL (includes the code above)



	
	
		'
		
		
		0
		
		
	
				
					BulTitl
					
					
  Switch Display

CSS

/* normal view styles */
ul.display li a {
    text-decoration: none;
}
ul.display li{
	background:#E3EFFF;
	margin:3px;
	border:1px solid #9FC2F1;
	height:130px;
	list-style:none;
}

ul.display li .content_block {
    padding: 5px;
	clear:both;
    margin:4px;
}
ul.display li .content_block h2 {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 2px;
    font-weight: normal;
    font-size: 1.4em;
}
ul.display li .content_block p {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 5px 5px 5px 145px;
    font-size: 1.2em;
}
ul.display li .content_block img{
    padding: 5px;
    border: 4px solid #336699;
    background: #fff;
    margin: 2 9px 2 2;
float: left;
}
/* thumbnail view styles */
ul.thumb_view li{ width: 200px; float:left; background:transparent; }
ul.thumb_view li h2 { display: inline; text-align:center; margin:2px; padding:2px }
ul.thumb_view li p{ display: none; }
ul.thumb_view li .content_block a img { margin: 5 0 10px; }
/* styles for the style switcher buttin */
a.switch_thumb {

	padding:5 5 5 25px;
	margin:10px;
	background:#D6E8FF url('/_layouts/images/itcat.gif') no-repeat 5px 7px;
	outline: none;
	border:1px solid #9FC2F1;
	font-size:.8em;
}
a:hover.switch_thumb {
	filter:alpha(opacity=75);
	opacity:.75;
	-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)";
}
a.swap { background:url('/_layouts/images/itcontct.gif') no-repeat 5px 7px; }

If you want to use this same solution for a different type of list just create a dataview Web Part to display the items in the format you want and wrap everything in a container (div, ul, table) with a class. Also use tags (h2, p, span, div, etc.) to wrap the pieces of data you are displaying (this will make it easier to control with CSS). Change the CSS and JavaScript to work with you new container and XSL.

Got questions? Post a comment.

Adding Comments to a List Part 2

davecavins — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:28:05 +0000

So here is what we have done so far from Part 1

Create a custom list to hold our comments
Link the list with an Annoucements list using lookup columns
Create a page to display a single annoucement and the realted comments from our comments list.

This is what it looks like:

What we have so far.

All we need to do now is setup a form on the page to allow users to create new comments on the item they are viewing.

Adding the New Comment Form

Open the page in SharePoint Designer and add a Custom List form to the page below the comments list.

Insert a custom list form

Choose the comments list and select the new item form option

Your page should look something like this:

So now we have a form that we can use to add comments to our comments list but the problem is we need to make sure each comment is associated with the right Annoucement.

Associating the Comment

To associate the comment with the right Annoucement we need to set the value of the post field to corespond with the annoucement we are viewing. To do this we will use a parameter.

In the Common Data View Tasks pane click on Parameters
Create a new parameter (the name does not really matter). Set the parameter to get its value from the query string variable item.

So now we have the ID of the Annoucement and we just need to use that value to populate the Post column. To do this we will edit the comment form.

Click on the small arrow beside the Post field on the comments form and choose Format Item As > Text Box

Now we need to set the value of the text box to our variable.

In code view do a search for asp:TextBox
The code will look something like this

{@post}” __designer:bind=”{ddwrt:DataBind(‘i’,concat(‘ff2′,$Pos),’Text’,'TextChanged’,'ID’,ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),’@post’)}” />

Change the text attribute from {@post} to {$you-param-name}
Save the page and test it. When you load the page the text box should populate with the ID of the Annoucment that is being displayed (the same value as in the qurey string variable). Update the value of the query string variable just to make sure it is changing the text box value.
Once you have verified that the parameter is working properly you can hide the text box by adding the class ms-hidden to the holding it and the holding the label.
Test the form and verify it is working.

Redirect

When you tested the form you probably noticed that instead of bringing you back the the annoucements page you were taken to the AllItems view of the comments list. This is normal but not what we want. To fix this we will have to make a few more small edits to the comments form.

In SharePoint Designer delete the OK and Cancel buttons on the comments form (dont worry we will replace them)
In code view paste this code where you want the save button to be.
Set the redirect parameter to the url of whatever page you want to send people to.
Test the form and make sure everything works

Conclusion

Using this method you can add the ability to post comments to lists that are not blogs. Once you have everything setup and working its pretty simple to make the form and the comments look better using CSS. If you have questions feel free to post a comment.

As a result of some acusations of plagarism I am adding links to some other resources somewhat related to this topic. The point of this blog is not to duplicate or take credit for the effort of others.

Adding Comments to a List Part 1

davecavins — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:05:43 +0000

In SharePoint 2007 the only lists that offer a comments feature are the posts list in the Blog site template. Wouldn’t it be nice to allow people to post comments on other types of lists like announcements or documents? Well after lots of trial and error I figured out how to do it.

What you will need

Two Lists
SharePoint Designer
Basic knowledge of HTML

I’ll assume you already have a list setup on which you want to allow users to comment. For this example I will use a standard Announcements list.

So the first thing we need to do is create a list to hold our comments. I just used the following columns:

Title
Body
Post (lookup to main list’s ‘Title’ column)

In the main list you will need to add a column that points back to the comments list.

Go to the list settings page and click ‘Create Column’
Name the column ‘Comments‘ (the name does not really matter. Set the type to ‘Lookup‘
The lookup should get information from the comments list you created. The column should be set to the lookup column in the comments list. See the screenshot below. This column will show us the number of comments each item in our list has.

Ok so now that we have the two lists pointing to each other we need to show the comments on a page with our list item.

Add a couple of items to each list just for testing purposes.
Create a blank web part page.
Add a data view web part to the page to display the Annoucements list.
Create a parameter on the dataview named item and set it to get the variable from the query string.
Note : Whatever link user click to get to this page will need to pass the item ID as a variable in the query string in order for this solution to work. In my example I am passing the ID in the ‘item’ variable but you can use whatever you want.

set up parameter
Adjust the filter settings so that the list is filtered using the parameter that has been created. You can test to verify this is working by putting “?item=1” and the end of the url and the list item with an ID of 1 should be displayed.

Filter using the parameter
Add a web part to the page below the data view to display your comments list. Create a web part connection to filter the comments list based on the Title of the Annoucement list item.
Get Sort Filter from

Click Next

Test the page and you should see one annoucement and the related comment. In my next post we will create a form so that users can create new comments.