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.

Limitations of displaying attachments in DVWP

So on a recent project I needed to show a link to the attachment for each item in a list. A quick Google search found How to show Attachments with DataFormWebPart from Dario Martirani Paolillo’s Web Log. I was excited because it seemed to work well and was very easy to implement. 

As I was about to finish up the project I was given some new requirements which meant that there would be two Data View Web Parts on the page and both would need to show the attachments link.  This is when the issues started.  When you have two web parts on the page using the display attachments code the second one will just show “[value of field: Attachments]” instead of the actual link.  If anyone knows a good solution for this issue please post a comment.

I want to avoid using something like this jQuery solution by Paul Grenier simply because of the performance issues it will create.

Filter Lists by Date Range

On a recent project one of the requirements was that users be able to filter a list by a date range.  To this I tried using two date filter webparts connected to a data view webpart.  A detailed description of how to set this up can be found here.  This solution worked well enough but there was a page refresh after the user entered each date, so the user enters the first date (page refresh) user enters second date (page refresh again) and finally they get the results.  This annoyed me, I wanted to remove the extra page loads so I tried several things and this is what I finally came up with.

Setup

Using a content editor webpart build the form elements needed to collect the dates, two inputs and a search button.  Give each input a unique ID. Here is the code I used.

<script language="JavaScript">
function submitForm()
{
var startDate = document.getElementById('startDate').value;
var endDate = document.getElementById('endDate').value;
window.parent.location="default.aspx?T1=" + startDate + '&T2=' + endDate;
}
</script>
<p><div id="dateDiv" style="display:none;" class="filterBox">
<h4>Date Search</h4>
        Between
<input name="startDate" type="text" id="startDate" value="" size="15" class="dateformat-Y-ds-m-ds-d" value="">
and
<input name="endDate" type="text" id="endDate" value="" size="15" class="dateformat-Y-ds-m-ds-d" value="">
 YYYY-MM-DD
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Go"  onClick="submitForm();this.disabled=true;">
</div>

The class names are used to activate the date picker script but can be whatever you want. I used this date picker script from Frequecy Decoder

The submitForm() function simply takes the values from the inputs and adds them as query string variables at the end of the URL. We can now use these values to filter the list.

Filtering the Data View Web part

To filter the content of the DVWP based on the date we have to setup some parameters for the start and end dates.   Under ‘Common Data View Tasks’ just choose ‘Parameters’ for both the start and end date set the source as ‘Query String’. The query string variable will be whatever you defined in the JavaScript so in this case they are T1 and T2. Set the default value for the start date to some date impossibly far in the past and for the end date set it to something like the year 3000. This will ensure that the list will show all records if no values are passed for the start and end dates.

Then all you have to do is setup your filter based on the parameters from the query string.

You’re done.

Things to remember

The date has to be passed in YYYY-MM-DD format in order to work.

If the detault values for your start and end date parameters are not set high / low enough all records will not display when not date range is entered.

A Faster jQuery Preview Pane

A while back there was a post on EndUserSharePoint.com by Paul Grenier that described how to use jQuery and the CEWP to make a preview pane.  I thought it was a very nice solution and worked better than the out of the box preview pane SharePoint uses.  

Too Much Code

The only issue is the preview pane solution is that in environments with slow internet connections the preview pane will be almost as slow as if the user actually broswed to the display form for the item.

Although its done through AJAX jQuery is still having to load the whole DispForm.aspx and then only displaying the contents of  a specific element.  DispForm.aspx when rendered through the borwser (like most pages in SharePoint) is very code heavy with over 700 lines of code ( An Announcement List item). Reducing the amount of code jQuery has to load from the diplay form will decrease load times and make everyone happy.

Faster

Gabe Hilado and I decided to try to make it faster. The simple solution is to make your own diplay form in SharePoint Designer. First we tried creating a blank .aspx page and putting the list view webpart on it.  The reduced the amount of code on the page but I wanted it to be even faster.

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