Curiosity drives creativity. The only limit for your kid are there because you put them there.

I watched this YouTube recently, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was being interviewed and was asked a question: what would you do as a nation to increase scientific literacy.

Neil's answer:  What do you do at home?  What do you do with your kids?  Kids needs to be able to explore freely.  The home, he argues, is not a great place for exploration.  Play in the toilet?  No.  Garage?  No.  Kitchen?  No, no, no.

The kid goes to the kitchen and starts to bang pots together, you tell him to stop.  The consequence of stopping a kid, is stopping a kid from exploring.  The seeds of curiosity are the foundations of science.  The parents need to get out of the way. 

If the kid pulls petals from a  $10 flower you bought from the florist, but discovers an interest in biology.  That's the cheapest $10 you've ever spent on his education!

iPad, and Technology

Many of us marvelled at our children being able to pick up an iPad and use it right away.  We say surely this is proof of Apple's solid design principles, even a three year old kid can master this technology at ease.

That may be the case, but I've beginning to really wonder.  When was the last time you let your kid explore your keyboard?  He's banging and breaking your keys?  If you don't let him experiment, how would he know what banging the keys together does? 

Mr 3 presses the back button on the iPad.  It quit his favourite game.  He knows for certain that is NOT the button he wants to press when he is playing his favourite game.

I got a new Samsung LCD TV, it comes with an extremely complicated remote control.  Mr 3 learned how to use it to get to his cartoons in the morning and switch to Simpsons in the evening before sleep.  He can even switch input sources between HDMI (XBox) and normal Digital TV channels!  Look at this thing: My kid can operate this, can you?

Dungeons and Dragons, and story telling

I was convinced that he will enjoy playing board game, and in particular, dungeons and dragons with me. 

Lots of parents are doing this.  A game that you can play with your kid, and helps them on mathematics, story telling, spelling, imagination.

Considering that he is still wet behind the ears, I opted for D&D-lite: HeroQuest.

He is three.  He is playing his dwarf hero here, trying to cheat the dice roll because he knows he needs to get "skulls" on the dice to hit the Ogre.  Along the way, he has already fought off:

A goblin, an orc, 3 chaos warriors - one whose helmet is now stuck in the fireplace, and 1 skeleton.  The goblin had a pretty nasty bump on the head - he says the goblin shouldn't sleep on the floor because it's dirty.  We put him on the table, and use the empty treasure chest as a pillow.

• I asked him as he comes near a door - do you want to open the door?
• He says: Yes, open the door, see what's inside.
• I put down a skeleton
• He says: Skeleton! 
• I asked him, what are you going to do?
• He says: Run away - and proceed to yank the dwarf all the way back to the beginning.  I had to stop him and tell him that he can fight by rolling the dice.

Dungeon Master tip for dads:

If your kid is running low on HP, make sure he "finds" a healing potion next time he searches a table, door, monster's dead body.  Don't make things too easy, but don't get them killed.

I'm realizing something

This is probably my take home message and something I'll try to remind myself my whole life.

Your kid knows no limits. 

All the limits in his life, are put there by adults

People tell him he can't try to do something.  He can't go somewhere.  He isn't tall enough to go on a ride. 

The box on HeroQuest says ages 7+.  Did that stop Mr 3?  Who puts these age limits on game boxes?

You know, I hope it's not yet too late.  I ask him to do something, and he tries, but he fails, and he tells me:

I can't do it

It breaks my heart.  No, it's OK, you can.  Try again, I'll help you, let's try again.

Let your kid paint their room

This is something I've read separately, and actually got Lina to agree:

We will leave the interior decoration of our kid's room to himself.  Within his room, he can paint his walls.

We're in a new house.  He is free to paint anywhere on the walls in his room.  Why limit him?  Re-painting his wall is easy.  But the memories and his creativity being cultivated - those are absolutely priceless.

Say less No.  Say more Try

This is so much easier to write than to live.  When your kid is being silly and driving you crazy, can you really hold back on the No?

John, let your kid try.  Say less NO, say more TRY.

Creating Knockout User Experiences in SharePoint with JavaScript and REST services

Sydney SharePoint user group is 21st of February.  Where I'll be presenting Knockout, AJAX and REST services.

To many of us web/SharePoint developers, discovering jQuery made us love JavaScript again. Finally, here was a JavaScript library that made sense. It made everything a thousand times easier. Within years, jQuery had become the ubiquitous hammer in everyone's tool belt.

On the server side, SharePoint shipped with a complex Client Object model, REST services, and it is incredibly easy and flexible to build your own web services and use them in your solutions.  Even for SharePoint 2007, SPServices has made huge improvements in bridging how you can talk to the server.

There is one final piece of the puzzle: how do we easily fit data that we've obtained from the server back into the web UI seamlessly? What if there's a way to do data binding, MVC/MVVM style, and leave both the object and the UI robust and free of spaghetti code?

Knockout solves one of the most difficult remaining problem in creating complex business solutions entirely using JavaScript.  If you thought jQuery alone is awesome.  Discovering Knockout is like finding another beautiful library like jQuery all over again!

In this session, John will demonstrate how to build a fairly complex system using Knockout and jQuery.  As well as show examples of some of the systems that he's been building and the flexibility you can easily achieve with Knockout.

So bring your developer hats and be prepared to enjoy an evening of new exciting techniques!  Don't be afraid to ask questions too!

Teaser Picture

Figure: this is your SharePoint task list, but supporting drag and drop!

See you at the Sydney SharePoint user group.

InfoPath how to copy a repeating section using rules

For years, we all thought this was impossible.  You had to use code.  I somehow woke up with an idea on how to do this, and set about testing and to my surprise, found a solution.  Here it is!

The form set up

• Two repeating sections, Foo's and Bar's
• One additional integer field i to control which row to copy

Put the elements on the form:

The copy rule

Create a rule on the integer field i

1. We will use the normal action, then tweak it. 
   Give this rule the name "Copy"
   Start by defining a set field value rule.
   
   
2. Set /my:myFields/my:Foos/my:Foo/my:F1 to /my:myFields/my:Bars/my:Bar/my:B1
   
   
   There are a few issues so far with the default Set Field Value action related to a repeating section.
• For the Field (target), it will set ALL the matching nodes.
• For the Value, it will get the First matching node.
  
3. Let's fix the second value - we can do this in InfoPath designer.
   
   
   The expression is:
   ../my:Bars/my:Bar[number(../../my:i)]/my:B1
   
   This expression lets us copy a different row.
   
   
   
   So we can now copy value from any row - depending on what the number i is.
   
4. To fix the Field Target is a bit more difficult.  InfoPath designer doesn't give us a way to modify the XPath of the field.
   
   
5. Save the form.  We're about to do unsupported stuff. 
6. Publish the form to Source Files. 
   
   
   I publish to C:\Temp\CopyForm\
   
7. Close InfoPath designer.  Open the file C:\Temp\CopyForm\manifest.xsf file using NotePad or your favourite XML editor.
   
8. The "Copy" rule is hiding in this XML file, it looks like this:
   

<xsf:rule caption="Copy">
    <xsf:assignmentAction targetField="../my:Foos/my:Foo/my:F1" expression="../my:Bars/my:Bar[number(../../my:i)]/my:B1"></xsf:assignmentAction>
</xsf:rule>

9. Change it to:
   
<xsf:rule caption="Copy">
<xsf:assignmentAction targetField="../my:Foos/my:Foo[number(../../my:i)]/my:F1" expression="../my:Bars/my:Bar[number(../../my:i)]/my:B1"></xsf:assignmentAction>
</xsf:rule>
10. Save, and close Notepad.  Re-open manifest.xsf file using InfoPath Designer
    
11. Let's check our rule.
    
    
12. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  We're nearly there.

The loop

1. This rule is set on the number i, and runs once whenever the number i changes.
   
2. Lets set it up to increment.
   
   
3. Add a condition to stop incrementing when we've run out of rows
   
   
   
   
4. And to start the whole thing, remember we have a button.
   
   
   
   To start the process, set i to 1.  XML index starts from 1 to n.  Does not start at 0.
   

Result - InfoPath Filler

Starting...

Press "Copy"

Result - Form Server:

Starting Browser Form

Copy.

Note - InfoPath "Infinite Loop" limitation:

InfoPath is hard coded to only execute 16 rules before throwing the "Infinite Loop" error.



An error occurred in the form's rules or code. The number of rule actions or the number of calls to the OnAfterChange event for a single update in the data exceeded the maximum limit.

The rules or code may be causing an infinite loop. To prevent this, ensure that the rule action or event handler does not update the data which causes the same rule action or event handler to execute.

There is no solution for hard coded 16 rules.  So your i can not go over 16.

Download

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30ee4b030eeeef09cf0/1328417804074/CopyForm.xsn

Pretty up SharePoint 2010 mysite with showModalDialog (updated)

[This is an updated article from /blog/2011/8/3/sp2010-pretty-up-mysite-with-showmodaldialog.html.]

SharePoint 2010 My Site

SharePoint 2010 ships with this pretty mysite.  Packed with numerous features.

The problem with My Site, even back in the days of SharePoint 2007, is that your users get lost.  It doesn’t look anything like your nice branded site.  It doesn’t share the same global navigation.  In fact, users are so lost that they think they are in a place that they shouldn’t be in.

Result?  They close the browser.  Sometimes, if they are nasty, they tell their colleagues that the Intranet sucks - they can never find anything. 

If only we can render our mysite in a SharePoint 2010 showModalDialog, then it would look like this:

My Site in a modal dialog

Some of the immediate benefits:

• My Site remains totally un-branded, but now it is just demoted to an utility page.  That is, you keep the functionality without having to invest in how to make My Site look nice.
• Users are familiar with the SharePoint modal dialog, and can easily close My Site via the top right close buttons.
• Users don’t feel like they’ve left the site, because they can clearly see the previous page right beneath them.

Using modal dialog for user information

Even if you aren't using My Site, you can still use this for links on the page that would lead you to a user's information page.  Here's an example:

You click the user name, you are sent to the User Information page - completely losing your previous page.

Figure: EEk!  Where the heck am I?

We add this bit of jQuery

$(function(){
    $("a[href*='userdisp']").click(function(e){
        SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
             url: $(this).attr("href"),
             autoSize: true
        });     
        e.preventDefault();
    }).attr("onclick","");
});

This hooks into any <a> anchors on the page, whose href contains the word "userdisp".  And then override the onclick attribute to empty.  It also attaches a new click event handler, sending the click to a show modal dialog.  Lastly, it prevents default - so the default action from the click is swallowed.

Result - User Information in a pop up:

Figure: Now isn't this far more useful?!

Changing My Site

We have these two links that sends our users into Alice's Wonderland.

They both use a SharePoint JavaScript function STSNavigate2

We can override the JavaScript this way:

I did a simple prototype by overriding a SharePoint javascript function:

$(function(){
    // store a reference to the STSNavigate2 function
    window.oldSTSNavigate2 = window.STSNavigate2;
    window.STSNavigate2 = function (evt, Url){
        if (Url.indexOf("mysite") != -1) {
            // if the url contains mysite - open it in showModalDialog
            SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
                url: Url + "#",
                title: "My Site",
                autoSize: true
            });
            return;
        }
        // otherwise call the old version of STSNavigate2
        window.oldSTSNavigate2(evt, Url);
    };
});

Result - My Site in a pop up:

Notes - some odd CSS issues:

When a page is rendered in the modal dialog, SharePoint will automatically insert &IsDlg=1 to the argument.

My Site doesn't appear to have been exhaustively tested with IsDlg - and there are odd CSS issues that does appear.  Depending on the features that you plan to activate on your My Site, you may still need to invest in a small bit of CSS work to make sure nothing strange appears when My Site is shown in a Pop Up.

Still, I argue that the small CSS fixes are a lot less work than completely rebranding your My Site.

In general though, majority of the functionality are available without further modification and this is a good way to quickly test if this could work for you and your organisation.  Do let me know how this works for you!

SharePoint - JavaScript current page context info

Quick blog. On every SharePoint page there's a javascript context variable:

 _spPageContextInfo 
{
    webServerRelativeUrl : "/ProjectWeb",
    webLanguage : 1033,
    currentLanguage : 1033,
    webUIVersion : 4,
    pageListId : "{c1d7b89f-f07b-4e2e-b89c-76c315831d59}",
    pageItemId : 5,
    userId : 68,
    alertsEnabled : true,
    siteServerRelativeUrl : "/",
    allowSilverlightPrompt : "True"
} 

So if you are on /ProjectWeb/Pages/default.aspx

_spPageContextInfo.pageListId;   // list guid for Pages
_spPageContextInfo.pageItemId;   // ID for listitem

Special Note

siteServerRelativeUrl will tell you if your site collection is sitting at the root level, or mapped further down.  Fairly useful information for all sorts of mischief.

No idea why alertsEnabled is a useful information.

An Example

Say if you want to show the versions page:

var options = {
    tite: "Version History",
    url: _spPageContextInfo.webServerRelativeUrl + "/_layouts/Versions.aspx?list="+ _spPageContextInfo.pageListId +"&ID="+ _spPageContextInfo.pageItemId,
    width: 800,
    height: 500,
};
SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options);

This will get you the Version History page in a modal popup, without running any additional client context async query.

Figure: Version History showing in a modal popup.