Posted: March 25th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint, SharePoint Design | Tags: comments | 6 Comments »
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.
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Posted: March 15th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint, SharePoint Design | Tags: comments | 3 Comments »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 10th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint | Tags: CSS, Printing | No Comments »
Hides everything except the list and the breadcrumbs. More posts coming later this week.
*{ background-image:none; /* remove all background images */ }
.ms-sbcell, /* search box at top of page */
.ms-topnavContainer, /*horizontal nav container */
img, /*images */
.ms-globalbreadcrumb, /*breadcrumbs */
.ms-titleareaframe, /* page image */
.ms-siteactionsmenu, /*site actions menu */
.ms-pagemargin, /* left margin beside quick launch*/
.ms-quickLaunch, /* quick launch menu */
.ms-sitetitle, /* name name */
.ms-menutoolbar, /* list tool bar */
.ms-pagetitle /* page title */
{ display:none; visibility:hidden; /*width:0px; height:0px;*/
}
.ms-pagetitleareaframe table {
position:absolute; top:1px;
width:600px;
background-image:none;
}
.ms-bodyareaframe { /*remove border around main content*/
border:0px;}
Posted: February 2nd, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint | Tags: better forms, forms, jQuery, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
For the sake of demonstration I made a list called quotes. Each quote has a title, body and author field, as a requirement the body field should not have more than 200 characters. So to let users know when they are getting close to the character limit we will setup a character count script.
For this solution I will use this jQuery script from CSS Globe.
The default form
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Posted: January 25th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint, SharePoint Design | Tags: better forms, CSS, forms, jQuery, SharePoint | No Comments »
Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of posts on how to improve the out of the box SharePoint forms by using simple CSS and jQuery solutions. These solutions will help improve usability as well as enhance the look and feel. Look for the first post later this week.
As a point of reference this is what we will be starting with.
Standard SharePoint Form
Stay tuned for more soon.
Posted: January 20th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint, SharePoint Design | Tags: captify, Data View Web Part, jQuery, slideshow | 1 Comment »
Nothing makes a site look good like nice images. Using a large header graphic on you Sharepoint site can help direct users to some important information or announcement. Many non-SharePoint images use this technique to add interest to their site and attract visitors. Doing something like this in SharePoint will make your site a lot less ‘SharePointy’ (my made up word for sites that look like SharePoint). Here is how I did it.
Rotating images with captions
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Posted: January 6th, 2010 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint | Tags: CSS, icon, JavaScript, jQuery, SharePoint, user | 2 Comments »
When you are using a data view web part to display information including a person field SharePoint always shows the status icon beside thier name.
status icon
In some cases this is exactly what you want and can be very useful. But sometimes you just want to show a name and nothing else. With most fields you can just change the formatting options to change the display. If you choose to format the value as text SharePoint spits out this long html string.
<nobr><span><A HREF="/sites/site/_layouts/userdisp.aspx?ID=2">Cavins, David R</A><img border="0" height="1" width="3" src="/_layouts/images/blank.gif"/><a href='javascript:' onclick='IMNImageOnClick();return false;' class='ms-imnlink'><img name='imnmark' title='' border='0' height='12' width='12' src='/_layouts/images/blank.gif' alt='No presence information' sip='email@email.com' id='imn_8,type=sip'/></a></span></nobr>
Format as
Each of the other formatting options also provides un-desirable results.
Using some basic CSS we can get rid of the status icon and format the text so it does not look like a hyperlink. First wrap the field value in an element with a class. I used a span with a class of “person”
<span class=”person”>
<xsl:value-of select="@Author" />
</span>
Then just add this css to the page.
.person nobr span a {
text-decoration:none;
color:black;
cursor:default;
}
If you want to take it a step further you can use jQuery to remove the ‘href’ attribute. Using jQuery we can target the container with the link in it and then change the href value.
$('span.person a').removeAttr('href');
Posted: December 29th, 2009 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint | Tags: Document Library, SharePoint, SharePoint Designer, Workflow | 2 Comments »
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.
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Posted: December 4th, 2009 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint | Tags: jQuery, pre-populate, SharePoint | No Comments »
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
So to prefill the form with some information we used a simple jQuery script in a Content Editor Web Part on the NewItem.aspx page. Initially we tried to target the input by using its title. This did not work so I looked at the code of the page using FireBug. It turns out that the field is actually a hidden textarea and what you see on the screen is actually just a div with a class of ms-inputuserfield. Here is part of the code we used to populate the people picker.
<script type="text/javascript">
var user = "dcavins"
$(document).ready(function() {
$('div.ms-inputuserfield').text(user);
});
</script>
This script can used along with the SP web services to prepopulate the people picker and other fields of a list. This is useful if you have a contacts list where you want people to be able to add themselves or a task list where users are supposed to assign items to themselves. Prepopulating fields makes it easier for the user saving them time.
The Rich Text Field is similar to the people picker in that it also hides the actual textarea and uses a div instead. In a later post I will explain how to use the web service to prepopulate list fields with information from the current users profile.
Posted: November 10th, 2009 | Author: davecavins | Filed under: General SharePoint, SharePoint Design | Tags: jQuery, SharePoint, slideshow, web services, webparts | 11 Comments »
This is a very simple image slide show script that uses jQuery, SharePoint webservices and the default images library to show images with captions. All the content is pulled from default fields in the images library but feel free to add more fields and customize the code to fit your needs.
Slide show with captions
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