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.
Sometimes it is useful to allow users to quickly change how data is displayed. Changing the display can make is easier to see patterns or find a specific item you are looking for. With CSS and jQuery we can easily change the way content is displayed and arranged on the page. I got the idea for this post from here
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.
<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.
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.
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.
Stay tuned for more soon.
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.
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>
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');
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On a recent project I needed to create a simple vertical news ticker to display announcements from a SharePoint list. It was easy to do because I just used some of the code from the announcements slider I built a while back so I did not bother to write a post about it. Yesterday I saw a post on EndUserSharePoint.com about how to setup something similar so I figured I would share my (cheaper) solution.
A few features of the ticker:
Here is the code it can just be pasted in a content editor web part. The only dependency is jQuery. The code for the ticker came from this post on Net Tuts Plus. I removed the comments but you can see the commented code and an explanation here.
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