Dave Cavins » forms

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.

Improving #SharePoint Forms – Character Count

davecavins — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:21:10 +0000

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

Setup

So first off we need to add a link to the jQuery script and the plugin. You can do this using a content editor web part but I have noticed in some cases scripts need to be in the section of the page. The easiest way to add the scripts to the of the page is to use the following code.

So once you have all the scripts you need on the page we just need to attach the behavior to the form body form field. To do this we can add some JavaScript to the page in a Content Editor web part. We can use jQuery to select the element we want to target and then configure the plugin settings.

For more configuration options and explanations of the plugin check out this page.
I used the following CSS to style the appearance of the character count text.

.counter{
	position:relative;
	right:14px;
	top:0;
	font-size:12px;
	font-weight:normal;
	color:#555;
	float:right;
	clear:both;
	display:block;
	text-align:right;
	background:#fff;
	width:150px;
	padding:3px;
	border:1px solid #888;
	border-top:0px;
	margin-top:-1px;
	}
.warning{color:#660000; font-weight:bold;}
.exceeded{color:#e00; font-weight:bold;}

In Action

Too many characters

In the next part of this series we will add hints to the form fields and make some other improvements.

Improving #SharePoint Forms

davecavins — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:43:15 +0000

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.

Resizable textareas in SharePoint edit forms

davecavins — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:01:21 +0000

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:

There are two problems:

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

So all we have left to use is the title attribute. With jQuery we can select elements based on thier title. There are more details on using jQuery selectors on the jQuery website. To select our text box with the title “Simple Text” we use the following code:

$('textarea[title="Simple Text"]')

A quick way to check and be sure your selector is working is to call the addClass function in jQuery and change the background color or border color of the element.

Trial and Error

So after I verified the selector was working I applied the plugin but nothing happened. After some testing I realized the script would not work on the rich text box because SharePoint has a JavaScript that runs to initialize the WYSIWYG editor. I am still experimenting so if I get it working on the rich text field I will post and update. For now it only works with the plain text field.

Here is the code I used:

I just put the code in a content editor webpart on the EditFomr.aspx and NewForm.aspx pages. To add the CEWP to the page just add “&ToolPaneView=2″ to the end of the url to get the toolbar.