InfoPath - missing data connection files

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Sometimes, your InfoPath doesn't show you all the data connection files available in your SharePoint data connections library:

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In this screenshot, it is only showing 3. 
There is no way to navigate to see more.

 

Fix. 

Change the Item Limit in the default view for the Data Connection library in SharePoint.

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Change that number.  The default is usually 30.  I had previously changed it down to 3 to take the earlier screenshot.  Let's bump it back to 300.

 

Now you can see all the data connections again.

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Fixing Facebook preview picture of your SharePoint site

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I have a lot of friends in the SharePoint community, and I see a lot of SharePoint related links shared in my social circles.  Sometimes, these links are hosted on a SharePoint site.  Universally, you know they are hosted on SharePoint because Facebook has picked a really bad picture as preview for the site.

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Freebie referral: rules.ssw.com.au - SSW's Rules are some of the best I've seen documented in one place.  Check them out.  The site is beautiful.  It's just unfortunate that Facebook picks a really horrible picture asset for the preview.

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Setting up the Preview Picture

Facebook publishes how to talk to its crawlers.  The specification that talks about the Open Graph API is Open Graph - Using Objects.

To specify a preview picture is actually very simple.

<meta property="og:image" content="/storage/JohnLiu.jpg" />

 

You can also use the pre-Open Graph syntax, if you don't provide og:image, Facebook can infer it from rel="image_src"

<link rel="image_src" href="/storage/JohnLiu.jpg" />

You need to have this inside your <head> tag.  Add this to your Master Page.  Easy!

 

Debugging

Facebook actually has a pretty nice debugging tool that will tell you how the scrapper is visiting your site.  And this can be very valuable to get insight into why the picture you've chosen isn't appearing.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

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Here, it's showing me the problem.  My picture is too small.

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Fixed.

 

Now Facebook will pick the right picture all the time!

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SharePoint Saturday Canberra 2013

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Introduce your drastic UI changes... slowly

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We are in the middle of a somewhat sudden rebranding exercise.  One of the main colours that was used prominently in the previous theme of the website is now being retired as the UI is simplified.

 

So here is what we have right now:

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And here is where we're going (currently in development).

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Where's the Yellow?

 

In every case where we ask one of our existing users the first response is always: Where's the "Company Yellow"?

There's of course a marketing message that will go out with our latest release. 

But here's the secret developer compromise.

 

We can reduce the yellow, slowly, overtime

 

The old header background will remain.  But in the Javascript that's run on every page, we introduce a small piece of script that modifies the opacity of the background header.

var days = (new Date("2013-08-20") - new Date()) / (24*60*60*1000);  // remaining days until 2013-08-20
var opacity = (days > 0) ?  (0.5  * (days / 14)) : 0;   // starts from 0.5 opacity to 0
$(".header-banner").css("opacity", opacity);

What this does, is that over the course of two weeks, the yellow's opacity reduces from the original (50% at this next release) to 0%.  So as days go on, the yellow header begins to fade, and after two weeks, it will simply disappear!

I wonder what'd be the water cooler conversation.  Each person will wonder what happened to the yellow as it slowly faded out of our lives.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne 2013

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It's that time again!  I'm down in Melbourne for SharePoint Saturday later today on July 27. 

I'm presenting TypeScript and SharePoint, with updated notes as I have been working with TypeScript since Feburary.  It's been just awesome.

The SharePoint Saturday version of the presentation will be more developer focused, and I'm hoping my audience will come with their dev hat on and ready to play with JavaScript and TypeScript.

I'll update this post later to include the download files for the presentation.

See you at SharePoint Saturday.  Early night and early morning for me later.

 

Update

 

Again, I had a lot of fun in Melbourne, had a lot of fun discussions and talked to a number of you guys about TypeScript in the real world.  Drop me a line as you start to play with TypeScript in your own environment.

Happy Birthday shout out to Elaine van Bergen!

 

Downloads: