PhantomJS for SharePoint and Office365 at Collab365

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Great news everyone!

Collab 365 Global Conference

Collab 365 is a free online conference that's just around the corner - this is run by the team behind last year's successful SP24 conference (which was the craziest 24hours - around the clock and around the world).

https://collab365.conferencehosts.com/SitePages/GlobalConference.aspx

This time, the guys are less crazy and will instead have 12hours spanning over two days.  (So a total of 24 hours).

PhantomJS: Headless Browser for SharePoint and Office 365

I have been having a lot of fun locally presenting this topic in the Office 365 Saturday events around Australia, and will be presenting this online at Collab 365. 

My session is scheduled for 08 October (day 1 - my time), 12PM-1PM.  Please check your local time.  In Australia, this conference spans 08-09 October. 

https://collab365.conferencehosts.com/sitepages/agenda.aspx

PhantomJS is an interesting tool.  It is free - and it is basically browser that you can script to automate many things, without a UI.  I cover scenarios and scripts that will allow you to use it effectively with SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365.

If you are a developer - this is a great tool to add to your toolset.  Even if you aren't - as long as you aren't scared of a bit of scripting, you will still find the scenarios for PhantomJS interesting and, well, different.

There are several other sessions I wanted to catch up on, and plenty of MVPs and Microsoft presenting on all things Office 365. 

I hope to see you at Collab 365!

 

 

Office 365 Saturday 2015 - Melbourne

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I visited sunny Melbourne (so strange!) for Office 365 Saturday last weekend, covering PhantomJS and SharePoint.  We also geeked out in general around the lunch desk and debated the direction of Add-Ins and the future of SharePoint development.

It was so good to see many of the locals turn up - familiar faces and new faces.  We geeked out on PhantomJS and why you need to know about this tool for your toolbox, even if you don't need it right now.

We then flowed onto Colin's session on making a million dollars (in progress) in the App Store. 

Downloads to my presentation and zip files.

Melbourne was so enjoyable.  I had to leave early to catch my flight home.  Next stop is Adelaide:

Office 365 Saturday Adelaide - 12 September 2015

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/adelaide

Fixing SharePoint Promoted Link's New Tab Launch Behaviour

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There's a bug with Promoted Links web part in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, and I have no idea how long it's been there.  This post is about a simple Javascript hack that will fix it.

Story

Robert Crane [O365 MVP] found this one.  Out of the blue, he asks me, hey why does the new tabs always open in the same tab.  I thought, no way, it's always been working.  So naturally, I tried it out and check the anchor tag.  Expecting target="_blank"

TLDR

  • Promoted Links spits out target="="_blank"" for who knows how long.
  • Here's a fix.

SharePoint's Promoted Links Web Part

A quick introduction - this is the Promoted Links web part.  If you have seen SharePoint 2013 or Office 365's SharePoint Online, then you have seen this web part.  It is used everywhere for navigation.

Promoted Link is backed by a regular SharePoint list.  Of interest, is the Launch Behavior column, which lets you decide what to do when a tile is clicked.  You can navigate there Replacing Current Page, open in SharePoint's ModalDialog, or open in a New tab.

Open in New Tab

To prevent spammers running Javascript and creating lots of tabs when you visit a page, a browser gives no way for Javascript to create new tabs.  The only way to do this, is natively in HTML, the tag looks like this:  <a href="http://bing.com" target="_blank">B</a>

SP2013 (and Office 365) spits out this:

What would this do?  Because target="="_blank"" is not a name that the browser knows about, it thinks, ah you want a new tab target, with that name.  So the first click is OK, you navigate to that URL in a new tab.

The problem is that if you click multiple Promoted Tiles, they will all be loaded in the same tab, instead of different new Tabs.

IE11 seems OK

Curiously, IE11 creates new tabs.  This however doesn't work on Edge.

Culprit

There seems to be a bug in sp.ui.tileview.js, adding target= into the attribute.

 

Fix

This can be fixed with a small bit of Javascript.

Edit the Page where your promoted list is giving you trouble.  Say the Home Page.  Insert "Embed Code" in a Web Part zone at the bottom of the page.  (This short cut creates a Script Editor Web Part there)

Paste this bit of script.

<script language='javascript'>
function fixATargetBlank(){
    // using sharepoint's mQuery because I don't want to have
    // dependency on jQuery in this quick script
    m$("a[target][clickaction]").forEach(function(a){a.target="_blank";});
}
// add this function to tell SharePoint to run it on load
_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("fixATargetBlank");
</script>

The Script Editor will appear blank.  That's OK.  Save the page.

Result

The target is fixed to _blank.  And clicking on the promoted links now opens them in separate new tabs, in all browsers.



PhantomJS and Office 365 Brisbane

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I thoroughly enjoyed my trip up to Brisbane.  I got to see some friends, saw my sister and presented PhantomJS with SharePoint and SharePoint Online.

 

The response was tremendous, those that came to my session seems really interested and gave me more ideas for future discussions. 

The presentation and demo are here

The new business case scenarios:

  • Automated Smoke Testing of sites - randomly check pages and DOM exist - "nothing has so far blown up"
  • Smoke Testing of sites with different credentials!
  • Scanning and scrapping text off dynamic (Single Page Application) pages and feed them to SharePoint's Search Indexing Service.  Thus, you can have textual search linking back to dynamic URLs.

I also really enjoyed Elaine's session on SharePoint 2016.


The next Office 365 Saturday in Australia will be in Melbourne.  The registration is up here:

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/melbourne

Clearing SPD Cache from SharePoint Designer

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Our good old friend SharePoint Designer is old, but I still find it useful for editing JavaScript files in development for quick tests.

Because SharePoint Designer caches what it thinks the site's contents look like, sometimes, this cache gets out of date with reality and you will see issues when SPD thinks you have some files checked out, but you don't.

And in the past, I would go and Bing and search "clear SharePoint Designer cache" and this will net you:

So there's no shortage of finding the command to clear the folder.

Until Today

I came across this part of the SPD UI by accident.

  • Select Home in the current site. 
  • Go to Site Options.
  • Select Advanced Tab
  • Click Delete Files (temporary files)

You will see that any currently Opened Folders views will be empty. 

As the cache for the site has been dumped.  You need to refresh from the Ribbon Bar and you'll see the status of the items has updated correctly.

SharePoint Designer 2013

The same UI exists for SharePoint Designer 2013 as well.

No more command line, perhaps.

Let me know in the comments if this was something you've ALWAYS known about, or whether it also made you feel foolish that you've been using the command-line or deleting cryptic user profile temporary folders for years, literally.  When there's a button that does this for me.