REMIX thoughts: where HTML5 and Silverlight fits in with SharePoint

/

Congratulations to Microsoft Australia for pulling off another really great REMIX event. 

My biggest take-home thoughts came from the combined session “HTML5 and Silverlight: a love story” by Tathom Oddie and Justin Taylor.

This is their message, paraphrased:

You need to know your persona [user group], if you are trying to reach as many people as you can, you need to build for reach, go with HTML5, graceful-degradation to Silverlight, and have a download link for the browsers that can’t do either.

On the other hand, for your special users that are heavily using the system, you may want to give them a basic HTML upload capability, but feature-enrichment with additional premier experience (a rich application on the iPhone), or better upload experience with Silverlight, and even live recording capabilities. For this persona, you can convince them that they can have a much better experience if they download Silverlight.

(Followed by nice singing from Justin).

 

There’s an awful lot to think about going forward.  I love Silverlight and the possibilities you can do with it, at the same time it is true that to reach your audience you need to come to their level.

So a compromise, I suggest:

For SharePoint 2010:

  • For the consumer, where the user wants to see SharePoint content but not really contributing
    • Aim for HTML/HTML5 – this enables most features should someone in your board of directors want to view something in their iPad. 
    • Gracefully degrade to Silverlight, because many people in the organization may not be using IE9, Silverlight at least is easily available on Windows platforms and works with Windows XP and IE6
  • For the content creator, where the user may be using a lot of rich applications to interact with SharePoint
    • Start with the basic HTML (not HTML5).
    • Feature-enrich with Silverlight – your users already have the environment, it is easier to develop in, and has a significantly richer API
    • Silverlight 5 with Trusted Mode in Browser will enable browser-Office scenarios allowing browser to interact with Office client applications

InfoPath 2010 - embed HTML for rich and web forms

/

Do we like the SharePoint content editor web part?  Yes!

What if there's a way to add your own HTML in your InfoPath form, and have it appear for both web forms and rich (InfoPath Filler) forms?

Here are the quick steps:

  1. Create an external XML file to store the HTML we need
  2. Add the external XML file as a secondary data source for the InfoPath form
  3. Use the Rich Text control and bind the result from the secondary data source
  4. Using resources in the form (images, CSS)
    1. Tricks for InfoPath Filler Rich Form
    2. Tricks for InfoPath Browser Form
  5. Adding your own CSS
  6. Notes
    1. Script tag doesn't work (stripped from rich text control).
    2. Steps to refresh HTML content of the XML resource

 

1. Create the XML file

This is documented in MSDN Inserting line breaks into text using Rules 

 

This is pretty much the same thing - I'm inserting a namespace here so InfoPath knows this is a HTML block of text.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html>
  <myhtml>
    <b xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >A Bold Hello</b> World
  </myhtml>
</html>

Save it as html.xml

 

2. Add the XML file as a secondary data source

image

Figure: Add a secondary XML document

image

 

3. Use the Rich Text control and bind the result from the secondary data source

 

Remember to change the Rich Text Box to Read-Only

image

Figure: Add a new rich text box, then change it's binding

image

Figure: Bind it to the secondary data source

 

Run it in Preview (InfoPath Filler)

image

Figure: InfoPath Filler - looks good

Publish and run in browser (Browser Form):

image

Figure: InfoPath Form Server - also looks good

 

4. Use Image from form resources

 

Let's go one step further and play with resources such as images.  Add an image into the form's resource files

image

Figure: Go to resource files

image

Figure: Add a picture "Save.png"

 

Modify the HTML to refer to this image. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html>
  <myhtml>
    <b xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">A Bold Hello</b> World
   <img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="Save.png" border="1" />
  </myhtml>
</html>

Preview this:

image

Figure: works great in InfoPath Filler

 

Publish and view in Form Server:

image

Figure: Doesn't work so well in Browser Form

 

image

Figure: Raw HTML

 

4.1 Using form resources in Form Server

Let's see how does the Form Server handle images.

 

image

Figure: Create a picture button

 

image

Figure: Set the Picture to the resource

 

Publish, then check HTML source in the browser for the new picture:

<img style="width: 100%; height: 50px; position: static;" alt="" src=http://server/_layouts/FormResource.aspx?solutionId=XXX&solutionFile=Save.png hoverSrc=""/>

So the format is:

/_layouts/FormResource.aspx?solutionId=xxx&solutionFile=Save.png

 

Update this back in our HTML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html>
  <myhtml>
    <b xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">A Bold Hello</b> World
    <img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="Save.png" border="1" />
    <img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="/_layouts/FormResource.aspx?solutionId=XXX&amp;solutionFile=Save.png" />

  </myhtml>
</html>

IMPORTANT: Remember to escape the & in the query parameter to &amp;

Publish to Form Server again:

Compare the same form published on two different clients:

image

 

5. Add your own CSS

Let's try some other tags, this is the STYLE tag:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html>
  <myhtml>

    <style xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
       img {
           border: dotted 2px purple !important;
       }
    </style>

    <b xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">A Bold Hello</b> World
    <img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="Save.png" />
    <img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="/_layouts/FormResource.aspx?solutionId=XXX&amp;solutionFile=Save.png" />

  </myhtml>
</html>

image

 

Purple dotted borders.  Notice how it is also affecting the Ribbon in the Browser Form.

Use this to your advantage ;-)  

 

6. Notes

  1. Firstly, <SCRIPT> won't work.  The rich text control strips them out.
  2. Refreshing the XML file when you update it is a bit of a painful process.  This is just the way it is with secondary data sources in SharePoint.  If you are using offline files, you need to go through the wizard again to overwrite the previous connection (and refresh your offline cache).  But if you are storing that XML file in SharePoint - you can just publish a new version there and tell InfoPath not to cache it.