Switch Themes Without a Page Refresh: Part 2

 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. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Anything Slider in SharePoint – Update

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.

<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="dvt_StyleName">Table</xsl:variable>
		<xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row" />
		<xsl:variable name="RowLimit" select="3" />
		<xsl:variable name="dvt_RowCount" select="count($Rows)" />
		<xsl:variable name="IsEmpty" select="$dvt_RowCount = 0" />
		   <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"></script> <div class="anythingSlider">
			<div class="wrapper">
		<ul>
			<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.body">
				<xsl:with-param name="Rows" select="$Rows" />
				<xsl:with-param name="FirstRow" select="1" />
				<xsl:with-param name="LastRow" select="$RowLimit" />
			</xsl:call-template>
		</ul>
		</div>
        </div>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template name="dvt_1.body">
		<xsl:param name="Rows" />
		<xsl:param name="FirstRow" />
		<xsl:param name="LastRow" />
		<xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
			<xsl:variable name="dvt_KeepItemsTogether" select="false()" />
			<xsl:variable name="dvt_HideGroupDetail" select="false()" />
			<xsl:if test="(position() &gt;= $FirstRow and position() &lt;= $LastRow) or $dvt_KeepItemsTogether">
				<xsl:if test="not($dvt_HideGroupDetail)" ddwrt:cf_ignore="1">
					<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.rowview" />
				</xsl:if>
			</xsl:if>
		</xsl:for-each>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template name="dvt_1.rowview">
		<li>
		<div class="textSlide">
			<h3><a href="/{@FileDirRef}/DispForm.aspx?ID={@ID}" title="{@Title}"><xsl:value-of select="@Title" /></a></h3>
			<xsl:value-of select="@Body" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
		</div>
		</li></xsl:template>
	</xsl:stylesheet>
</Xsl>

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

<xsl:variable name="RowLimit" select="6" />

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.

<SharePoint:SPDataSource runat="server" DataSourceMode="List" SelectCommand="&lt;View&gt;&lt;Query&gt;&lt;OrderBy&gt;&lt;FieldRef Name=&quot;Created_x0020_Date&quot; Ascending=&quot;TRUE&quot;/&gt;&lt;/OrderBy&gt;&lt;/Query&gt;&lt;/View&gt;"

 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.

Displaying document titles as links.

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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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 »

Dynamic Drive’s Featured Content Slider in Sharepoint

I have used Dynamic Drive’s Featured Content Slider on a couple of recent projects and wanted to see if I could get it working in SharePoint. There were several key requirements:

1. User can easily add items
2. Users  can choose a style for each item
3. Expired Items must not show
4. Each item will have a Title, Body and a customizable “read more” link.

Here’s how I did it.

First I created a custom list to store the slider items.  These are the columns I used:

Title – Single Line of text
Body – Multiple Lines of text
Link URL – HyperLink
Expiration – Date and Time (expired items will not be shown)
Image – Picture
Style – Choice  (we will use this column to allow users to choose the style of each item)

On the page I used a DataView WebPart to display the Title, Body, Image and Link URL columns.   Using Sharepoint Designer I setup filtering on the expiration date.  To do this in design view right click on the data view webpart and bring up the “Common Data View Tasks ” box and choose Filter.  In the window I set the conditional statement so that items would only be shown if the expiration date was greater than today. Read the rest of this entry »

Adding Suggestions to the Sharepoint search box

I got the idea for this from here: http://cssglobe.com/lab/searchfield/. The idea is that by giving users suggestions of what they should be searching for they can be guided to the most important information. When I am searching for something many times I am unsure what what search terms will give me the best results.

To get started we will need a search box to work with.  The out of the box search box could work but I prefer to use the one mentioned here by Kyle Schaeffer because it gives me a lot more flexibility with the design.    Read the rest of this entry »