SharePoint Thoughts

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SharePoint gives new capabilities that developers can use to do same tasks required in previous versions of SharePoint using client side technologies. The main capability introduced in SharePoint 2013 is CSR (Client Side Rendering). The most common used method for CSR way is to manipulate users data for fields or list views.. But what about forms?

Someone is going to say: “Yes, SharePoint provides JS Link property for list forms as well, so what’s new with it?” Well, there’s more into it. Let’s see what can be done in list forms and to what extent we have the flexibility to do the forms we want.

Here we have a list called Customers, with a new form that looks like this:

Now, we want to make this look different, so we’ll be using JS Link for that. If you edit the newform page, and edit the web part:

Then go to Miscellaneous, you will find three important properties there:

1. Form Template Name
2. JS Link
3. CSR Render Mode

We know that with JS Link we will be able to add a JS file and manipulate our form’s design. We also know that CSR Render Mode being set to standard it tells SharePoint to renders the form using CSR, and setting it to Server Render will make it depend on XSLT for that. But what about Form Template Name and its ListForm value?

If you had experience with SharePoint customization from previous versions specially for forms, you know that SharePoint uses technique called: Rendering Templates. Which is a group of predefined templates SharePoint has and uses them to render its pages and forms. If you have an on premises environment, you can go to this path: SharePoint Hive\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES, you will find a file called: DefaultTemplates.ascx:

If you open that file, you will find many controls with the tag: <SharePoint:RenderingTemplate.. . If you search for ListForm, you will find that it’s actually a rendering template that SharePoint uses to render its forms. But the good thing to know is, you can use another value which is CSRListForm. But what’s the difference?

The difference is that ListForm renders everything for you from SharePoint, like the layout for the form, the label names and so on, so if you need to use JS Link to style your list forms while you are using ListForm rendering template, you would need to use jQuery to restructure your HTML. So what if we use CSRListForm instead? Your list form would look like the following:

It will only render the fields for you, no labels, no buttons, no spaces between fields, nothing.. just fields. So you will have a clean output that you can play with in JS Link as much as you like! That’s neat!

Now let’s add a JS Link property to a .js file and try to style our form, there’s a file that my friend Muawiyah Shannak created and posted on MSDN, you can download the JS Link file here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/CSR-code-samples-11-Fully-54ebcaa6

Here we are declaring the objects necessary to form our view:

var formTemplate = {};

formTemplate.Templates = {};
formTemplate.Templates.View = viewTemplate;

Inside the viewTemplate function we have the following code:

function viewTemplate(ctx) {

var formTable = "".concat("<table width='100%' cellpadding='5'>",

"<tr>",

"<td><div>Title</div></td>",

"<td><div>{{TitleCtrl}}</div></td>",

"<td><div>Date</div></td>",

"<td><div>{{DateCtrl}}</div></td>",

"</tr>",

"<tr>",

"<td><div>Category</div></td>",

"<td><div>{{CategoryCtrl}}</div></td>",

"<td><div>Active</div></td>",

"<td><div>{{ActiveCtrl}}</div></td>",

"</tr>",

"<tr>",

"<td></td>",

"<td><input type='button' value='Save' onclick=\"SPClientForms.ClientFormManager.SubmitClientForm('{{FormId}}')\" style='margin-left:0' ></td>",

"</tr>",

"</table>");





formTable = formTable.replace("{{TitleCtrl}}", getSPFieldRender(ctx, "Title"));

formTable = formTable.replace("{{DateCtrl}}", getSPFieldRender(ctx, "Address"));

formTable = formTable.replace("{{CategoryCtrl}}", getSPFieldRender(ctx, "VIP"));

formTable = formTable.replace("{{ActiveCtrl}}", getSPFieldRender(ctx, "Country"));

formTable = formTable.replace("{{FormId}}", ctx.FormUniqueId);



return formTable;

}

As can be seen, we’re constructing the HTML for our form, for this article and on MSDN, we made it static just for learning and explanation purpose. You can do whatever technique you prefer to form the HTML.

Three things to note about this code:

1. Note how we have {{placeholders}} for each field we want to add in our HTML.
2. Note also the getSPFieldRender function, I’ll explain that later on.
3. The input button has an onclick function = SPClientForms.ClientFormManager.SubmitClientForm(‘{{FormId}}’) . This will allow us to use the out of the box capabilities to leverage the submit action and handling validations in the form.

Back to getSPFieldRender, this will go look into the form for each field by its internal name, and will get this field’s HTML, which will be replaced instead of the place holders such as {{TitleCtrl}}. This happens by using the CurrentFieldSchema and drilling down to the Field’s HTML from the ctx.Templates.Fields, As shown below:

function getSPFieldRender(ctx, fieldName)

{

var result = ctx.ListSchema.Field.filter(function( obj ) {

return obj.Name == fieldName;

});



ctx.CurrentFieldSchema = result[0];

ctx.CurrentFieldValue = ctx.ListData.Items[0][fieldName];



return ctx.Templates.Fields[fieldName](ctx);

}

Now, when apply this JS Link to our list form, SharePoint will render the fields, and place them instead of our placeholders, it would look like below:

Without using any jQuery hacks, you can now apply your designs to your list forms with the use of CSRListForms.

Hope that gave more understanding to List Forms and CSR.

An Error you may face is when you try to run a simple SharePoint Management Shell Command, it gives you an error saying :

The HTTP service located at http://localhost:(portNumber)/securitytokenserviceApplication/securitytoken.svc is too busy.

And no commands were working at all.

In this case check the Application Pool for the SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool, you’ll notice it’s stopped, start it and try again.

If you used RSS feeds with SharePoint, and want to make a button where it will display an RSS for specific pages library, you will notice that title in the RSS will open the properties page for the page, not the page itself, so how to change the option?

Go to your “Pages” library, and click library settings in the ribbon, click on RSS settings, you will see a category called “Document options”, change the “Link RSS items directly to their files?” to yes

After changing this option, you’ll see the expected results.

Happy SharePointing

When you first install SharePoint and open Central Administration for the first time, you’ll be given two choices, either to run the configuration wizard and let SharePoint do the administrative tasks for you, or configure the farm yourself.

If you configure the farm yourself and decided to add the Managed Metadata Service, you would simply go to Application Management>> Manage Service Applications>> Click new and choose managed metadata service. The SharePoint will create the Service Application for you. So if you try to click on the Managed Metadata Service Application you will be presented with the following error:

The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started. Please Contact your Administrator.
To Solve this issue, go to Central Administration >> System Settings Tab>> Manage Services on server>> and notice the managed metadata web service, its not started by default. click start and go back to your service applications page and view your service application. Note you may need to wait fora minute so that the error will disappear and you can use the service application.

There is a requirement that is requested so much to change the Add new item label in SharePoint lists to something meaningful. The good about these labels is that they have an ID that you can play with using JavaScript. Each of SharePoint lists has ID that is different from a list to another.

For the custom list you have the ID= idHomePageNewItem,  for document libraries it is = idHomePageNewDocument, you can know the exact ID using the IE developer tool or the Firebug in Firefox.

To change the label, use JavaScript, you get the ID of the anchor and change the innerText property. The code is like this:

document.getElementById(‘idHomePageNewItem’).innerText= “my new text”;

That’s it.

I was trying to install SP Foundation on my Hyper-V machine, and I faced this problem:

After searching and searching online, some people mentioned activating services and trying to run the configuration wizard again, others mentioned navigating to Microsoft Office Servers folder, which doesn’t exist anymore in the RTM release of SP Foundation, but the same principle works for the RTM. All you need to do is to navigate to the following path:

c:Program FilesWindows SharePoint Services15.0Data, and you’ll find an Analytics folder with a GUIC appended to it. All you need is to share this folder.

Hope this helps someone out there as it took a while for me to resolve.

Here is a short video that will show you how you can style your pages using Apptex:

Templates available until now:

Tabs: 

Accordions: 

Testimonials: 

Events: 

Slider: 

Google Maps: 

Bing Maps: 

Styled Google Maps: 

Quick View: 

Modern Tiles: 

Pinterest View: 

Line Chart: 

Bar Chart: 

Radar Chart: 

Polar Area Chart: 

Now Apptex supports SharePoint on-premise in the new release. Please send us your suggestions for desired templates.

Quick info for people out there .. Recently Microsoft Virtual Academy has announced the introduction of Know it Prove it program, which is dedicated for technology enthusiasts who wish to learn more about their favorite technologies. The program includes 8 categories that you can choose your favorite area from, and a link to it was added to the home page of the MVA site: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ .

For the moment, it seems just a challenge for yourself to be able to complete these courses, but later on, it seems it would be more than that, but it’s nice to see Microsoft has organized some learning paths for people to know where to start with their preferred technology.