Hey there. Welcome to part 3 of my series on SharePoint customisation using JavaScript and web parts.

So here is the lowdown so far. We are trying to find an effective, repeatable way to easily customise SharePoint form pages, so that we can hide fields or form elements when we need to. The goals were to:

• Allow hidden fields based on identity
• Avoid use of SharePoint Designer
• Avoid customisations to the form pages that unghosted the pages from the site definition

So how have we progressed thus far?.

• Part 1 of this series looked at how we can use JavaScript to deal with the common request of hiding form elements from the user in lists and document libraries.
• Part 2 wrapped this JavaScript code into a web part which has been loaded into the SharePoint web part gallery.

So let’s knock the rest of this over and pick up right from we left off…

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement of this post depends on how much you hate JavaScript.

Metrosexual web developer   

Socially inept technical guy   

[Quick Navigation: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6]

Continue reading “More SharePoint Branding – Customisation using JavaScript Part 3”

Hi again.

JavaScript sucks! There I said it. Despite me hating it as a programming language, I can’t deny that in SharePoint, it does have its uses.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement of this post depends on how much you hate JavaScript.

Metrosexual web developer
Socially inept technical guy
Luddite IT manager	(sorry … why are you here anyway?)

[Quick Navigation: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6]

To quickly recap the first post of this series, we looked at how we can use JavaScript to deal with the common request of hiding form elements from the user in lists and document libraries. The technique demonstrated can be used for columns, buttons and whatever else you want. The method once debugged, is fairly easy to implement with SharePoint designer with and some cut and paste.

But there are several problems with the method that prevent it from getting a better CleverWorkaround rating than “Meh”. They include:

• One size fits all, fields are hidden for all visitors irrespective of need.
• You need to modify the page in SharePoint designer via cut and paste of JavaScript code
• You need to modify auto-generated pages
• You need to modify a page from its site definition
• Insecure, relying on client side to hide content/controls is not a secure solution

Continue reading “More SharePoint Branding – Customisation using JavaScript Part 2”

Hi all

I thought with my last post that involved XSL/XSLT, I’d escape from horrid programming languages and write about more interesting topics but it wasn’t meant to be. This time round I had to delve back into the world of JavaScript – something I swore that I would never do again after a painful encounter back in 2000. (Yep, it’s taken me 8 years to face it again!)

But like everything else with SharePoint, by being a ‘specialist‘, you seem to have to use more technologies and IT disciplines than you would think possible.

As I progressed writing this article, I realised that I was delving back into branding again and toyed with the idea of making this part 8 of the branding series. But the governance topic in part 7 for me rounded off that series of posts nicely, so I will deal with this separately for now and perhaps refresh that series in the future.

Like a vast majority of my posts, this will also be a mini series.

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for Metrosexual web developers):

CleverWorkArounds Coffee requirement rating (for the rest of us ):

[Quick Navigation: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6]

Continue reading “More SharePoint Branding – Customisation using JavaScript – Part 1”

For those of you who are developers and have to program XSL and XSLT, you have my deepest sympathies. I thought that regular expressions were bad, but this takes the cake! Despite my best efforts as a SharePoint architect/consultant, I seem to invariably have to deal with programming issues more often than I’d like.

In saying that though, XSL/XSLT is very powerful of course and I fully appreciate why the Data View web part is popular among developers. Anyway, I digress. This post is about forms services and SharePoint Designer workflow, but I had to dabble into this world to solve my problem. A word of warning though, this is a workaround but it’s not that clever.

The Symptom

You create a SharePoint designer workflow and attach it to a forms library, configured to run in forms server mode (in the browser). You create a “Collect Data From a User” workflow action, and when the workflow recipient clicks on the task, the “Related list item” field in the task is not rendered in the browser.

Continue reading “Form Services and SPD Workflows…”

Well, here we are! After delving into dark arts where everybody but metrosexual web designers fear to tread (HTML and CSS), we then delved into the areas that metrosexual web designers truly fear to tread (packaging, deployment and even some c# code!). Finally, we get to the area where everybody is interested until it happens to get in their way! (Ooh, I am a cynical old sod tonight).

That is Governance!

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 7 -The ‘governance’ of it all..”

There has been a bit of a gap in this series between part 5 and 6 – and fortunately for the both of us, I think this is the penultimate post in my series on SharePoint branding. While it has been an interesting exercise for me, I must confess each successive article is getting harder to write as my interest is shifting 🙂  So many sub-disciplines within MOSS – I think I might delve into WCM soon :-).

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 6 – A "solution" to all issues?”

Pretty much since I started with MOSS2007 (and back in the pre 2007 days too), I’ve required smarter drop down choices for my columns. Basically, I needed a secondary drop down list filtered based on the choice from a primary drop down list – the whole category/sub category thing. Seems amazing to me that it is not available out of the box.

On my to-do list was to write a detailed post critiquing all the workarounds out there (such as Patrick’s Javascript method and Dattard’s designer work) and rate their cleverness – as per the branding series.

Continue reading “Finally – clever filtered lookups!”

So, here we are at the fifth article in my series on SharePoint branding. By now, we have left all the master page stuff way behind, and we have created a custom feature to install our branding to a server.

To recap for those of you hitting this page first, I suggest you go back and read this series in order.

• Part 1 dealt with the publishing feature, and some general masterpage/CSS concepts and some quirks (core.css and application.master) that have to be worked around.
  
• Part 2 delved into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue
  
• Part 3 delved further into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue and the option that solved a specific problem for me
  
• Part 4 then changed tack and introduced how to package up your clever branding
  

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 5 – Feature Improvements and Bugs”

Welcome to the fourth article in my series on SharePoint branding. Sorry for the time it’s taken to get this one out, but a certain game called “The Legend of Zelda:  Hourglass Phantom” on NDS got in the way. I finished it yesterday and only had to cheat via google once :-). Anyway it’s out of my system now so I can get back to this.

After 3 epic articles on all that painful CSS and master page stuff (part one, two and three), we now focus on what you have to do to get your branding masterpiece deployed to the SharePoint farm the clever way. In this next set of articles, we will look at where things should go, and then how to get it there the right way.

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 4 – Packaging up your masterpiece into a Feature”

After a web designer applied a new master page to a site, he killed the site. We saw these messages (debug logging was enabled on the site)

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

——————————————————————————–

Compilation Error

Description: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.

Continue reading “Careful with pre-requisite SharePoint Features”