SharePoint Holmes

soon: uCertify review 70-667

2012-01-11T01:40:00.001-08:00

The people from uCertity asked me to write a review on their 70-667 preparation kit.
Initially this looks great, but people who are close to me know that I now have much more important stuff going on in my life then to blog right now ;)

And for those who don't know yet, my girlfriend gave birth to a gorgeous little girl, Charlotte.

SharePoint adoption: Team SLA's

2011-12-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on the networkworld community site with a post from Susan Hanley about User Adoption.

She talks in that post about micro strategies for adoption, and how they almost seem like Service Level Agreements for team members.
She thinks it is a good idea to explicitly write down an SLA on how team members should behave (SharePoint-wise) in a project or on a site. That way, your team members will use the “best practices”. Great list to lay down on a kick-off meeting, especially with people who never worked with SharePoint before.

Her example list:
For our project team:
- We will use the team site template that's been used on other projects - the one that we are either already used to using or will start seeing on everything that we are working on.
- We won't email documents to one another - we will just send links to documents in our team site.
- We will make sure that all of the work for the project, even documents that are not finished, are stored in the team site.
- We will all make sure to use the Status attribute when we share documents, indicating whether a document is a Draft, Ready for Review, or Final.
- We will use Ratings to indicate whether a document is potentially reusable or a candidate for a best practice example. (In other words, this is the framework we will use to apply document ratings - this is what ratings mean for our team.)
- When we are assigned a task to review a document for a colleague, we will review the document and update the assigned task.
- We will tag content as it is added, even if the attributes aren't required!
- We will let the team leader/project manager know if the metadata scheme needs to be adjusted.
- We will use a Meeting Workspace for agendas and minutes and we will upload meeting presentations to the workspace at least 4 hours in advance.
- We will use the Discussion Board instead of email to post questions and solicit feedback from each another.
- We will each agree to complete our user profile.
- We will share key project milestones in our status updates in our My Site.
- We will be accountable for checking the team site regularly - either by setting up alerts or using any other approach that fits within our personal work process.

I will probably use this in a project in the near or far future

Book review: Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010: Unleashed

2011-12-05T09:13:00.001-08:00

The people from Pearson tweeted me if I wanted to do a book review on the Kathy Hughes book on SharePoint Designer, called “SharePoint Designer 2010 Unleashed”.

Tweeting and unpackaging Sure, I replied, I am doing a lot of stuff with SPD these days, so I can do a practical check to see if my questions (and those of my customer) are dealt with in this book.

I picked it up (riding my bike all the way through the Antwerp Harbor with pouring rain) and I was immediately amazed at the weight of the book! When I removed the cardboard packaging, the orange/red cover with 1600 pages of SPD goodness was looking at me.

The book: Parts, Chapters and content
The book is divided into 4 parts, who have their respective chapters.
In the beginning of the book you have the “Contents at a Glance” overview, showing those parts and chapters:

Part I: Welcome to SharePoint Server 2010
1. SharePoint 2010 Overview
2. SharePoint 2010 Architectural Overview
3. Introduction to the SharePoint 2010 Fluid Interface
4. Design Administrative Tasks: Site Settings, Permissions and Creating Sites
5. In-Browser Customization: Navigation, Content Pages and Content
6. In-Browser Customization: Branding with Web Parts, Themes and Master Pages

Part II: Enhancing Sites with SharePoint Designer 2010
7. Web Interface Design with SharePoint Designer 2010
8. Creating Sites with Site Templates
9. Working with Content Types and Columns in SharePoint Designer
10. Creating and Configuring Lists and Libraries

Part III: Styling and Designing SharePoint 2010 Sites
11. Understanding SharePoint Designer Editing Features
12. Working with Content Pages in SharePoint Designer
13. Building New Content Pages and Configuring Web Parts and Web Part Zones
14. Extending Content Pages with Media and Dialogs
15. Creating New Publishing Page Layouts
16. Working with and Creating New SharePoint Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
17. Creating New SharePoint 2010 Master Pages
18. SharePoint Themes and Themable CSS: The Icing on the Cake

Part IV: Data Manipulation and Business Processes
19. Configuring Data Sources (Non-BCS)
20. External Content Types and External Lists (BCS)
21. Manipulating Data with ASP.NET Data Controls
22. Overview of XSLT List View and Data View Web Parts in SharePoint 2010
23. Working with XSLT List View Web Parts (XLVs)
24. Working with the Data View and Data Form Web Parts
25. Configuring and Customizing List Forms
26. Customizing List Forms with InfoPath 2010 Forms
27. Using Workflows and Creating Custom Workflows
28. Creating Custom List Actions: Adding Buttons to the Ribbon and List Item Menus

After that, a ToC is shown with all the processes that are described in the book. That list goes on for about 23 pages.. no shortage on content here!!

Same for the end of the book..40 pages with index so you can look up a specific word or functionality ( like “Conditional Formatting”).
That leaves about 1500 pages of pure, shiny SPD functionality! Really every aspect of using SPD passes by, from creating workflows to creating custom forms, from configuring external datasources to changing the look&feel.

A large number of “notes” are scattered around the how-to’s to give more in depth information or to outline special cases (“adding the rating control to content pages is only relevant where you are running SP 2010. It does not apply to foundation”).
This makes the book ideal for people who are working with SharePoint (just started or SP Veterans). Almost no code is mentioned in the book (except some small css or very understandable other stuff) and all the how-to’s are really clear. I also like the best practices. It is not when you can that you should, so these come in handy for the less tech-savvy in the organization. They are clear and give the reason why you shouldn’t.

My 0.02 $
Just like SharePoint Administrators have their SharePoint Administrator’s Companion book, key users / information workers have this “bible”. Every SharePoint team needs at least 1 copy of this book because once you have it nearby, you are going to use. A lot! I noticed that my other SharePoint team members are more at my desk then before just to browse in the book.

It covers everything (and I do mean everything) you can do with SPD2010, very efficiently written in a process structure so you can follow the steps in order to get to your goal. A lot of images help you to keep on track.
I know there are a lot of good (and sometimes not so good) sources online, but they are not always right or apply to an old beta version. Kathy did an amazing job on writing this, and I can only imagine the hard work and hours of blood, sweat and SharePoint tears that were necessary to create this “all the cool stuff you can do with this program” book. If she wasn’t a MVP already, she would sure get my vote!! (not that anyone ever asks, but hey..)

This book is not going on my shelve, I am going to keep it on my desk next to my keyboard so I can grab it every time I need it!

Andy Caubergs is blogging

2011-12-05T09:12:00.001-08:00

Andy Caubergs, the SharePoint developer at Dexia (for as long as it is called that) has also started blogging about his SP tech slumberings.
He is a great dev, so be sure to add him to your blogroll!

5 tips for more efficient jquery selectors at sitepoint

2011-12-04T12:43:00.001-08:00

The people at Sitepoint just posted this great post about writing more efficient jquery selectors. Very useful if you don’t know a lot about code and you are starting to use jquery in your environment. Their post is not about SharePoint, but the tips can be used in your SharePoint jquery code.

Their 5 tips:
- Use and ID if possible (not that easy with the terribly long ID’s in SharePoint)
- Avoid selecting by class only
- Keep it simple
- Increase specifity from left to right
- Avoid selector repetition

Get or set a SharePoint multiline textfield in SharePoint via jquery

2011-12-04T12:42:00.001-08:00

Well, the title says it all.
To set the value:

$("textarea[Title=’Name of my field’]").closest("span").find("iframe[Title='Rich Text Editor']").contents().text(“demo text”);

To get it:

Var Variable1 =  $("textarea[Title=’Name of my field’]").closest("span").find("iframe[Title='Rich Text Editor']").contents().text();

Prepopulate fields with the SharePoint Form Field Assistant

2011-12-01T12:32:00.001-08:00

I have already covered a great script by Paul Grenier about how to fill SharePoint fields with values from the url.

Christian Dehaeseleer from U2U told me this morning about another codeplex project from Paul Grenier that is called the “Form Field Assistant”.

Practically, it does about the same thing, but it looks more complete. Very handy is that it is a separate library that you can load when you want to. There is a problem with the loading though, if you are going to use this invoke the library via:

function customLoadEvent()
{
        $.spff({ lock: true }); 
}
_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("customLoadEvent");

(as discussed here)

Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs Review announcement

2011-12-01T12:25:00.001-08:00

Yesterday at Biwug (I know, this sounds a lot like “this one time at bandcamp”) I got this really cool prize for being the first one to register: a copy of the book “Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs” by Wrox. It is a part of the “Programmer to programmer” series and edited by Scot Hillier.

Those of you who follow my blog since a few years will remember I did an extensive review on the 2007 version of the book chapter by chapter.

And that is exactly what I will be doing here: going through all chapters and grabbing all “lessons-learned” from the guru’s. Why you ask?

Well, this blog is first and foremost my own knowledge management tool. It is set up so I can retrieve stuff that I did long ago in other projects. If the contents of my blog help you or others fix a problem, great! (please drop me a line if it does or buy me a beer :) )

The book is a lot of heavier then the 2007 one and the number of MVP’s is higher now with 22 MVP’s as 16 MVP’s in 2007. So, first an overview of the chapters:

Chapter 1: Building a Perfect Test Environment for SharePoint Server 2010.

Chapter 2: Up grading to SharePoint Server 2010 — The Hybrid App roach

Chapter 3: Monitoring SharePoint 2010

Chapter 4: SharePoint 2010 Security Under the Hood — Claims¬Based Authentication

Chapter 5: Using PowerShell with SharePoint 2010

Chapter 6: Backing Up and Restoring SharePoint 2010

Chapter 7: Working with SharePoint Designer 2010

Chapter 8: Building Sandboxed Solutions

Chapter 9: SharePoint 2010 Web Parts

Chapter 10: Automating Business Processes

Chapter 11: Building Customer Service Applications for the Right Situations

Chapter 12: Managing the SharePoint Application Lifecycle

Chapter 13: Using Silverlight 4 with SharePoint 2010

Chapter 14: Business Connectivity Services

Chapter 15: Using PerformancePoint Services 2010

Chapter 16: Managing Metadata with SharePoint Server 2010

Chapter 17: Understanding SharePoint 2010 Search

Chapter 18: Understanding Branding in SharePoint 2010

Chapter 19: Planning, Designing, and Administering a Multimedia Assets Management Solution

Chapter 20: Accessing SharePoint Data

Chapter 21: Finding Answers to Your SharePoint 2010 Questions

Set a SharePoint people field with jquery

2011-11-14T10:54:00.001-08:00

When I talked about how to update fields in SharePoint, I was talking about the easy stuff: input fields and stuff. Now, I wanted to update the people picker on my form.
I did some googling and found a solution by Marc D. Anderson (the authority on sharepoint jquery ;) ) but I couldn’t get that to work here.

I also found a really easy solution by Dave Cavins who uses the class to define the people picker. Only bad thing with this solution is that it updates all people pickers:

Combined with SPServices it gives the following result to automatically fill in the current user:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
$(document).ready(function() { 
$('div.ms-inputuserfield').text($().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({fieldName: "Title",debug: false}));}); 
</script>

How to format numbers with commas in SharePoint Dataview (using decimal-format functionality)

2011-11-10T15:43:00.001-08:00

In a dashboard project we had to display certain valuta fields that came from a SQL-SERVER table. Those fields had following formatting:
139367709,8800
0,00000,00
51345998,3700

The goal was to display them as European style valuta:
139.367.709,88
0,00
51.345.998,37

To do that I used the xslt format-number() function

<xsl:value-of select="format-number(@YourField, "$#,##0.00;-$#,##0.00")"/>

Result was empty fields and a sad look on my face.
So I asked the help of a developer (since I am not one, but I like to mess around in code).
Apparently, the commas in the numbers were giving the format-number() a hard time to recognize it.
After some playing around with the string() and number() functions, I was no step closer.

What I thought would help me, was to replace the commas with a point. I tried the w3schools xslt replace() function, but that gave me an error in SPD, saying the function was not recognized, although it appears to be a valid xslt function.

The trick here is to use the translate() functionality, which is essentialy the same as replace(), but it converts the string instead of replacing it.

<xsl:value-of select='format-number(translate(@YourField,",","."), "#.##0,00")'/>

Now we had values instead of blanks, but the formatting still wasn’t right.
Switching the point and comma in the format-number gave errors as well. Then our eyes fell on the optional decimalformat parameter. After a quick google for a working example we learned that we had to add a separate xsl command to describe how we wanted our field to look like:

<xsl:decimal-format name="european" decimal-separator=',' grouping-separator='.' />

Note: the description of the decimal-format has to be placed outside the xsl:template your field is in because it is not a valid line that you can add in a xsl:template.. More about the decimal-format here.

The final xsl line looked like this and gave us the correct result:

<xsl:value-of select='format-number(translate(@YourField,",","."), "#.##0,00", "european")'/>

Long story short
If you want to translate numbers, use the default SPD “Format item as – number” functionality or build-in Xpath Expressionbuilder which will get you something like following code:

<xsl:value-of select="format-number(@YourField, "$#,##0.00;-$#,##0.00")"/>

If you want to display it in a different way, use the decimal-format functionality which will get you something like this: Outside the xsl:template block:

<xsl:decimal-format name="european" decimal-separator=',' grouping-separator='.' />

To display the field:

<xsl:value-of select='format-number(translate(@YourField,",","."), "#.##0,00", "european")'/>

Loading dates via SharePoint Designer Datasource creates problems with daylight savings time

2011-11-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

At a dashboard project I was using the SharePoint Designer DataSource functionality, getting data from a SQL-Server (more on why in this blogpost).

I was having a funny issue however: all dates I got from SQL-SERVER had 1 hour off. When I had the date “15/10/2011” in SQL, I would have “14/10/2011 23:00:00Z”. Sidenote: in Excel, the value was correct.

I looked at the code behind the page and found this value-of-select:

<xsl:value-of select="@DATE_IN"/>

I double-checked the regional settings on SQL, SharePoint, site and my pc, but all were ok. I posted the question on the MSDN forum (great source if you can’t find a solution to your SharePoint issues) and AbedKhooli replied me that those dates are put in UTC because of the xml standard. I needed to convert them one by one. Final code is as follows:

<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@DATE_IN),2067,'dd/MM/yyyy')" />

In this example, “2067” is my locale and ‘dd/MM:yyyy’ is how my date is supposed to show up. Works perfectly.

Remove original message from a SharePoint discussion forum reply via jquery

2011-11-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

Someone on the MSDN forum asked how to remove the original message when replying to a thread.
That smelled like a jquery job to me!! Here is the code, as always don’t forget to reference to the correct jquery file:

<script src="/sites/library//jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var d = $(' .ms-rtestate-write');
d.text("");
</script>

What the code does is: get the item with class ms-rtestate-write and clean out the text in it.

Set the width of multiple lookup fields in SharePoint via jquery

2011-11-07T14:41:00.000-08:00

Another Jquery post here.

This time we are taking a look at the “multiple select lookup fields” in SharePoint. You get a field like this when you create a new lookup column, and check the “allow multiple values” box in the additional column settings.

It looks so tiny: we got a line with 2 select boxes and 2 buttons in the edit page: Behind it however, there are a lot of code lines: a few hidden input fields, a table, a select and ALL your data.

So what if your lookup lines are rather long ? After a close inspection of all the stuff that is there, you can see there are 2 select fields that actually matter. And to make things easy for us (thank your Microsoft), they even have really nice names as well:

The first one, which holds the list of possible values, has the title: “your field name possible values”. In our example here, the title is: “multiple lookup possible values”.
The second one, which holds the list of selected values, has (can you guess it already?) the title “your field name selected values”. In our example here, the title is: “multiple lookup selected values”.

This makes it very easy to grab the components and do all kinds of kinky things with it.

Code for setting the width: Important: for this to work, the setting “Launch forms in a dialog” in advanced settings has to be set to “no”. Make sure you link to the correct jquery file.

                <script type="text/javascript" src="yoursite/yourlibrary/yourjquery.js"></script>
                <script type="text/javascript">
                $(document).ready( function() {
                $('select[title="multiple lookup possible values"]').width(550);
                $('select[title="multiple lookup selected values"]').width(150);
                });
                </script>

If you want to grab all multiple lookup fields at once, you can use:

$('select[multiple="multiple"]').width('300');

Hide title bar in SharePoint

2011-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

If you want to hide the title bar, just add a Content Editor Webpart to the page with following code:

<style type="text/css">
#s4-titlerow { display:none }
</style>

Hide the SharePoint Search box via CSS

2011-11-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

Every page in SharePoint has a search box on the right upper side. If you want to hide that on one page, add a Content editor webpart with following code:


<style type="text/css">
#SRSB {display:none}
</style>

Get the value of a SharePoint People Picker field via javascript

2011-11-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

The ever handsome and cunning Marc D. Anderson (I felt like giving the man credit, since I use so many of his solutions!!) saved my behind once again with a fantastic javascript!
This time I was looking to find a solution to get the value from a people picker field via jquery.

A quick search took me to his blog where I found this code:


// Find a People Picker's value using its identifier (ff1, ff2, etc.)to find it in the page 

function getPickerInputElement(identifier) { 

var tags = document.getElementsByTagName('DIV'); 

for (var i=0; i < tags.length; i++) { 

var tempString = tags[i].id; 

//alert('tags[' + i + '].id = ' + tempString); 

if ((tempString.indexOf(identifier) > 0) && (tempString.indexOf('UserField_upLevelDiv') > 0)){ 

//alert('HIT for ' + identifier + ' id=' + tags[i].id + ' value=' + tags[i].value); 

var innerSpans = tags[i].getElementsByTagName("SPAN"); 

for(var j=0; j < innerSpans.length; j++) { 

//alert('innerSpans[' + j + '].id = ' + innerSpans[j].id); 

if(innerSpans[j].id == 'content') { 

//alert('HIT for ' + identifier + ' id=' + innerSpans[j].id + ' innerHTML=' + innerSpans[j].innerHTML); 

return innerSpans[j].innerHTML; 

} 

} 

} 

} 

return null; 

}

This works by filling in a variable with the result of the function. You give the identifier as a parameter when you call it:
var person = getPickerInputElement("ff18");

Why I stopped using BCS and started loving SharePoint Designer DataSource

2011-10-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

For my current customer I was developing an itemdetail application where they had a mix of own data (stored in SharePoint) and 4 tables from a SQL-SERVER.
They have a SP2010 Standard Edition. The solution was a homepage where I can search between 30 000 items and a link to a custom page with the details.

The link was build with a dataview webpart where I added a unique identifier as a querystring parameter.

At first I was using BCS: making 4 external Content Types, 4 external lists. They can be placed on the page and connected to the querystring parameter to filter the item. That goes great when you have a few items, but when you are looking at 30K items, things are becoming quite slow.

In Standard Edition SharePoint, you don’t have the BCS Webparts, so you cannot use parameters to query the exact item you need. I only found a way to get the item via a load of all items, and then a filter of those items.
That is when I discovered the Datasources in SharePoint Designer.
You can create a new datasource very easy, just provide a sql server, username and password and you can create your query. You have the possibility to add parameters (like querystring parameters).

When you have created that datasource, you can just add it via a dataview webpart. Easy as pie!
My page now loads in about 1 second. Easy to say I am a happy hippo!
More info on the datasources in SharePoint Designer:
Datasources
Issues and workarounds

Enable " Append changes " on multiline textfield in SharePoint 2010

2011-10-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

In the default SharePoint “Issue Tracking” list you have the “Comments” field. Every time you add text to it and save the item, it is stored and the current text is added to the previous.
You can get the same behavior an ony other multiline textfield you create. When you create the field, check the radiobutton to “Append Changes”.

That will get you a normal multiline textfield. If you save the field and edit it again, the previous changes are not stored!

So how can we make it so that the changes are saved? Go to your list settings and enable Versioning on the list.

If you go back to your item, you will see all previous text is now saved underneath the field and you can append your own text.

Hit Shift-Enter in a SharePoint multiline text-field to insert a new line instead of two

2011-10-25T13:17:00.001-07:00

At my customer, we created a solution where users can fill in some comments in a multiline textfield.

Unfortunately, every time they entered some lines, they appeared a little bit too far from each other.

Looking at the code, SharePoint put or a p or double div’s around the line.

After some testing, the solution became quite obvious: use the Shift-Enter combo (just like in Microsoft Word) to keep the lines close to each other.

SharePoint Business Model

2011-10-23T10:50:00.001-07:00

Recently I was doing some research on SharePoint Governance. I was browsing through some slideshare presentations and there I found this absolute gem:

Ben McMann from Tribridge talks in this presentation about the SharePoint Business Model. In my view, any project ( not just SharePoint) should start with making up such a thing. This should be the basis of your governance, the start on why and how you are going to manage things.

I know I am going to do this exercise before I start a new project!

What's Your SharePoint Business Model?

View more presentations from Ben McMann

Microsoft Productivity Hub is a Quick Win for Training and Governance

2011-10-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

The Productivity Hub 2010 is a customizable, on-premise training solution for technology products. Developed by RedTech for Microsoft, the Productivity Hub is based on SharePoint 2010. Code for the Productivity Hub's Sliverlight components and other add-ons can be found here.

The Productivity Hub can help improve information worker productivity by giving users the answers they need quickly. The site delivers an engaging user experience by offering rich, task-based training content, how-to videos, learning roadmaps, forums, and more.

By incorporating a professional user interface design, Silverlight web parts, and using native SharePoint features such as dataviews ratings, and keyword tags, the Productivity Hub solution illustrates just a few of the many capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010. Additionally, the site can be customized to reflect your company's branding or other unique training requirements.

Here is a short video on the use of the Productivity Hub.

SPSDemo has put a demo site online:

A really good walkthrough on installation and contents:

Rename item in order to work when you create a new item based on the title

2011-10-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

Quite a title this time :)
Let me explain:

I have a list where people can add items to: requests for a ticket.
Those tickets are ( if approved ) getting into a workflow: every ticket becomes a folder in a list, where we can have actions as list items.

The problem was that my workflow crashes when a forbidden character is used as the name for the new item(item1 “Title” serves as item2 “Name”)

The forbidden SharePoint folder and file name rules are:
o Do not use: " # % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~
o File names cannot be longer than 128 characters
o Do not use the period character consecutively in the middle of a file name.
o You cannot use the period character at the end of a file name
o You cannot start a file name with the period character

This code checks for forbidden characters (# % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~) and removes them on Keyup().
It also checks if the title has more then 128 characters.

I know it is not complete (no check on period as first char and so on), so please bare with me.


function noweirdchars(){
        var str = $(":select[title=Title]").val();
                var patt = new RegExp( /[#%&*:<>?\/\\{|}~]/m );
                $(":select[title=Title]").val(str.replace(patt,""));
                                          
if ($(":select[title=Title]").val().length > 128)
        {
                alert("Name can only have 128 characters");   
                event.preventDefault(); 
        } 
}
$(document).ready(function() {
                $(":input[title='Title']").keyup(function(){
                noweirdchars(); 
        });
});

add a PreSaveAction on the SharePoint "input type=button"

2011-10-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

My previous blogpost was about how you could replace the SharePoint:SaveButton with a input type=Button in order to add a redirect after you have filled in the form.

Today I wanted to add the PreSaveAction() functionality and it didn’t work. After some research and testing I found out that the input type=Button does not have that PreSaveAction() handler build in the genericFireServerEvent.
So you just have to add it there:


<input type="button" value="Send" name="btnFormAction" onclick="javascript:if (PreSaveAction()){ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent(';__commit;__redirect={thankyou.aspx}')};" />

This has the same behavior: if you return false nothing happens. If you return true, the item will save and go to the redirect.

Add a redirect on a custom newitem form after you hit the "SharePoint:SaveButton"

2011-10-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

At a client, I am building a custom formin SharePoint via a custom newform. One of the requests was that after the form is submitted, users have to go to a “thank you” page.
If you insert a dataview, you get a normal “input type=button” which you can customize like I described here.

With a new item form, we have another button, the SharePoint:SaveButton.
SharePoint gives you this:


<SharePoint:SaveButton runat="server" ControlMode="New" id="savebutton2"/>

No onclick event here that we can use.
So, my first guess was to add a &Source parameter in my querystring:


https://myserver/sites/site/SitePages/customnewform.aspx?source=/sites/site/SitePages/thankyou.aspx

That works well, but if I click the Cancel button, I also get redirected to the thank you page. That is something we obviously don’t want.
We can, ofcourse, just delete that Cancel button and get ourselves a custom button with a redirect on it.

While pondering on the button in SharePoint Designer my eye fell on the button properties, which has a RedirectUrl property!!
Select the button, open the properties of that button and locate the RedirectUrl. Give in your own redirect and when you look at the code, a redirectUrl has been added.


<SharePoint:SaveButton runat="server" ControlMode="New" id="savebutton2" Text="Send" RedirectUrl="/sites/site/SitePages/thankyou.aspx"/>

Test it out!!
Unfortunately..That does not work in SharePoint 2010 !!!!!!
Don’t know why the option is still there.. I guess it is the same thing as the toolbar (that is on the page, but hidden..).

So, as a workaround, just replace that SharePoint:SaveButton with a input type=”button” !


<input type="button" value="OK" name="btnFormAction" onclick="javascript: {ddwrt:
GenFireServerEvent('__commit;__redirect={/sites/site/SitePages/thankyou.aspx}')}" />

How to check for attachments or limit the number of attachments in SharePoint via jquery

2011-09-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

A client had a business requirement that if someone added an attachment to an item in a list, a metadata field had to be filled in.

So I put on my jquery glasses (they are quite special, looking a bit like Dame Edna’s)

I ended up with following code which uses the PreSaveAction, a default function that runs every time you hit the "ok" button:


function PreSaveAction() {
// we create a counter and we go through the fileupload to check how many there are
  var count = 0;
  $("input[name^='fileupload']").each(function(){
  if ($(this).val() != ""){
      count++;
  }
  });
  // Then we check if the mandatory field is empty and if we have attachments
  if ($(":select[title=Contact means]").val() == “”) {
    if (count > 0){
            alert("Please fill the field if you have uploaded an attachment");
      return false;
    }
}
//if the field was not empty or we have no attachments, we don’t go into the if loop and we can go ahead and save the item
Return true;
}

This code could also be used to limit the amount of attachments a user can add.
That code would be:


function PreSaveAction() {
// we create a counter and we go through the fileupload to check how many there are
  var count = 0;
  $("input[name^='fileupload']").each(function(){
  if ($(this).val() != ""){
      count++;
  }
  });
  // Then we check there are more then 10 attachments
    if (count > 10){
            alert("Please limit to 10 attachments");
      return false;
    }
// if we have less then 10 items, we can just continue
Return true;
}

Don’t forget to add the jquery library reference!