Improving #SharePoint Forms – Hints

When users are asked to enter information in a form sometimes it helps to give them a hint regarding what types of information should be entered.  Out of the box you can enter a description of each field that will be displayed.  If you want something more dynamic here is how to do it. 

• Add jQuery to the page using the method described in this post
• Download the jQuery Hint Box plugin and link it to the page. 
• Call the script and set the options for the position and html content of the hint. Here is an example:

<script type="text/javascript">
$("input[title='Author']").inputHintBox({
	className:'simple_box',
	html:'Who is the author of this quote?',
	incrementLeft:-25,
	incrementTop:-15
	});
</script>

The above script simply selects  the field using its  title attribute then sets the css class for the element, its contents and position.

Here is the CSS I used for my example.

.simple_box{
	border:1px solid gray; background:url('/_layouts/images/toolgrad.gif');
	font-size:xx-small; color:#444; padding:7px;
}

Here it is in action.

hints

Improving #SharePoint Forms

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.

Displaying a rotating header image with caption

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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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.

<Xsl>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="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">
	<xsl:output method="html" indent="no"/>
	<xsl:decimal-format NaN=""/>
	<xsl:param name="dvt_apos">&apos;</xsl:param>
	<xsl:variable name="dvt_1_automode">0</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:template match="/" xmlns:x="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">
		<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1"/>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template name="dvt_1">
		<xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row" />
		    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/page.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/slider.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.easing.1.2.js"></script> <script src="js/jquery.anythingslider.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript">
        function formatText(index, panel) {
		  return index + &quot;&quot;;
	    }
        $(function () {
            $(&apos;.anythingSlider&apos;).anythingSlider({
                easing: &quot;easeInOutExpo&quot;,
                autoPlay: true,
                delay: 3000,
                startStopped: false,
                animationTime: 600,
                hashTags: true,
                buildNavigation: true,
         	pauseOnHover: true,
     	startText: &quot;Go&quot;,
     	stopText: &quot;Stop&quot;,
	navigationFormatter: formatText
            });
            $(&quot;#slide-jump&quot;).click(function(){
                $(&apos;.anythingSlider&apos;).anythingSlider(6);
            });
        });
    </script>
<div class="anythingSlider">
	<div class="wrapper">
		<ul>
		<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.body">
			<xsl:with-param name="Rows" select="$Rows" />
			</xsl:call-template>
		</ul>
		    </div>
        </div>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template name="dvt_1.body">
		<xsl:param name="Rows" />
		<xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
			<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.rowview" />
		</xsl:for-each>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template name="dvt_1.rowview">
		<li>
		<div class="textSlide">
<!-- display the item title and a link to the item -->
<h3><a href="/{@FileDirRef}/DispForm.aspx?ID={@ID}" title="{@Title}"><xsl:value-of select="@Title" /></a></h3>
<!-- display the body of the item  -->
	<xsl:value-of select="@Body" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
	</div>
	</li></xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
</Xsl>

• Important: Adjust the links on the code so that point to your local copies of the css easing and plugin files.

Notes

 I made a few small changes in the css file to make things work better with SharePoint.  In page.css file I deleted several of the classes so they would not interfere with SharePoint’s styles.  In the xsl I used a div with a class of  .textslide to wrap the content so I had to change that in page.css as well.  To keep long annoucements from breaking the design I set the overflow on the .textslide div to hidden. Below is the code I used in page.css.  

/*hide content that is too long */
.textSlide { padding: 10px 30px; overflow:hidden; }
.textSlide h3  { font: 20px Georgia, Serif; margin-bottom:12px; }
.textSlide h4  { text-transform: uppercase; font: 15px Georgia, Serif; margin: 10px 0; }
.textSlide ul  { list-style: disc; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
.textSlide ul li  { display: list-item; }

 I did not make any changes to slider.css. It may be easier to just combine the tow files to keep things simple and reduce page load times.

Conclusion

The AnythingSlider plugin is lightweight, powerful and easy to customize.  Adding this type of functionality that is common on regular websites to a SharePoint site can help guide users to important information and of course make your site ‘cooler’ than the average SharePoint site. 

The code above just shows all the items in the list but once you have it working it is easy to add your own sort/filter parameters to the data view so only certain items are shown.

The slider could also be implemented to run off of the SharePoint list web service the same way I did in this post.  If you have any questions or comments feel free to post.

Image Slideshow with captions

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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Resizable textareas in SharePoint edit forms

So one of the things that I have had end users complain to me about is the size of the text boxes on the new and edit forms of lists like the contacts list and announcement list. On a recent non-SharePoint project I used a jQuery plugin to create a resizable text area so I tried to implement it in SharePoint. Here is what happened.

I downloaded the Textarea Resize JavaScript jQuery plugin, saved in a SharePoint library along with the latest version of jQuery.

Selecting the Element

In order for the jQuery code to work it has to know which elements on the page you want to work with.

Here is the code SharePoint renders for a text box:

<textarea name="ctl00$m$g_3fa2cde8_0ea8_4421_814f_6a6d292fbe54$ctl00
$ctl04$ctl0ctl00$TextField"
rows="15"
cols="20" id="ctl00_m_g_3fa2cde8_0ea8_4421_ctl00_TextField" title="Body"
class="ms-long" dir="none"></textarea>

There are two problems:

1.  ASP.NET creates very long and hard to use IDs
2. The class ms-long culd apply to other elements on the page that I dont want to use the effect on.

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Adding Suggestions to the Sharepoint search box : Part 2

In Part 1 of this post we used a simple javascript to display suggestions on a custom search box. After I wrote that post I was thinking it would make more sense to read the suggestions from a list instead of a JavaScript file. This post will explain how to setup the list and edit the JavaScript to read the suggestions from a list. The idea is that an administrator could manage the list and help guide users toward specific information instead of getting numerous un-related results like in those commercials for bing.

Assuming you already have the search box setup as described in Part one of this post all you will need to do is change the javascript and add some code to the page.

Setup

• Do everything from the first post
• Add a link to jQuery somewhere on the page.
• Create a custom list called ‘Suggestions’. It just needs to have the default title field. Create at least one item in the list and in the title enter several comma separated words.
• Add the code below to the page.

<script type="text/javascript” src=“http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js”></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function GetItemsFromSP() {
    var soapEnv =
 “<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'> \
                <soapenv:Body> \
                     <GetListItems xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/'> \
                        <listName>Suggestions</listName> \
                        <viewFields> \
                            <ViewFields> \
                               <FieldRef Name='Title' /> \
                           </ViewFields> \
                        </viewFields> \
                    </GetListItems> \
                </soapenv:Body> \
            </soapenv:Envelope>”;
       $.ajax({
        url: “_vti_bin/lists.asmx”,
        type: “POST”,
        dataType: “xml”,
        data: soapEnv,
        complete: processResult,
        contentType: “text/xml; charset=\”utf-8\”“,
        async: false
    });
}
function processResult(xData, status) {
    $(xData.responseXML).find(“z\\:row”).each(function() {
        $(“#data”).append(“” + $(this).attr(“ows_Title”) + “,”);
    });
}
</script>
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“Resources/searchfield.js”></script>
<div style=“display:none; visibility:hidden” id=“data”></div>

The code above get the items from the Suggestions list, seperates them with commas and puts them in a hidden div with an ID of data. Now we just need to edit the searchfield script to read in the information from our hidden div. To do this edit searchfield.js line 26 to call the GetItemsFromSP function and set the suggestionText variable to be equal to the contents of our hidden div. Here is the code.

/**/*/*/*/**/
	GetItemsFromSP();
	var suggestionText =  $(“#data”).html();

Test the page and make sure it works by typing the first few letters of one of the words in you list item.

Conclusion

This is very similar to Jan Tielens’ SharePoint Search-as-You-Type with jQuery solution but I wanted the search box to still be usable even if there are no suggestions. In Jan’s solution the ’search box’ does not actually do anything when the magnifying glass is clicked. There are likely better ways to do this and if you know of one please post a comment.

Styling SharePoint Blog Comments: Part 2

As promised I went ahead and styled the comment form on a standard SharePoint blog.  I wanted to make it look better than this but there are some limitations because of the way the page is coded with so many nested tables. 

Better looking comment form

I kept the styles pretty simple but this should be a good starting point for someone wanting to do something more complex.
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Styling SharePoint Blog Comments

Out of the box the comments on SharePoint blogs dont look that good. 

Standard SharePoint blog comments

 Here is a way to fix that problem. Just add this CSS to the page and things should start looking alot better. Read the rest of this entry »

Better page titles in SharePoint

When working with multiple browser windows open its hard to tell one from the other because most SharePoint pages don’t offer a useful title. So in most cases you will see something like this (I am using the dreaded IE 6 unfortunately). As you can see most SharePoint pages only show the title of the page. On the home page of some sites the site name is shown as well.

Useless Page Titles

Ideally the page title should not only tell you the title of the page you are looking at but also what site you are on. Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks talks more about different options in this post. After some experimenting I was able to get this working in SharePoint.
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