SPSCBR - REST Service and jQuery AJAX

Climbed out of bed at 4am and drove myself and colleague Jumpei on a laughter-filled trip down to Canberra, where we had lots of fun at the SharePoint Saturday Canberra event.

Our best joke along the drive was debating whether Lake George is a real lake.  Our most scary moment was when the car wouldn't start back up after we took a 10min powernap.

As promised, my slide deck and a zip file of the VS.NET solution that was shown. 

While the concepts are still fresh you should build a rest service and see how this all works for you.  Enjoy :-)

Special thanks to Ishai Sagi who saved the day with an innovative 2-laptop remote-each other and project via SVG port.

Ran out of time, I couldn't cover in more detail...

• How to pass multiple parameters to REST, via a POST operation - the example is in my script and Rest service, but commented out follow that pattern.
• jQuery AJAX calls are asynchronous, you can fire 4 requests at the same time and they will run in parallel.  Number of asynchronous calls depends on browser but 4 is a common-minimum.
• Debugging javascript tips
• Packaging CSS/JS files in a sandbox solution tips
• Some consideration and discussions around sandbox solution webpart and quota

Files

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30fe4b030eeeef0a042/1316867614343/SharePoint+REST+and+jQuery1.pptx
• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30fe4b030eeeef0a043/1316868647487/SPGSvcWp.zip

Related Links

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdev/archive/2011/02/22/calling-a-wcf-service-using-jquery-in-sharepoint.aspx
• http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Calling-a-WCF-Service-using-jQuery-in-SharePoint-the-correct-way.aspx

For 2007, unfortunately you can't easily do REST, but a lot of the SOAP service wrappers are done by awesome people so you don't have to do it yourself.  Thank Marc.

• http://spservices.codeplex.com/

InfoPath - abusing a secondary datasource as temporary variable

This is an InfoPath technique that I've recently started using, and is pretty awesome.

Problem:

• InfoPath is great with rules and fields, but modifying the field means that your form has now changed.  In code behind we have formstate variables, but they are not visible by InfoPath rules.
• We may want to change these fields in later versions of the template.
• If only we can have temporary variables to use in InfoPath

Solution in one sentence:

• Create a secondary datasource, use abuse it to hold variables that you don't want to save to your main form

Real Example

How to detect if your form has been changed by the user since it was opened.  This is a tweaked version of Alec Pojidaev's How to check if your InfoPath form is “dirty”? (Tracking changes) using secondary temporary variables.

Steps

1. Create a separate secondary datasource
   
   
2. Add the XML file as a secondary datasource
   
   
3. Now we have a secondary data source that we can use
   
   
4. Use that datasource to keep all the "UI" logic.  Such as:
• "a checkbox to confirm whether I want to save and close, or just close"
• A rich text field to show a message that I display on a separate message View
• Various validation or toggle Booleans to control the UI
5. Because the secondary datasource is not saved back to the main datasource, changes to the secondary datasource tree can be considered "discarded", effectively giving us "temporary variables" that rules can use.
   
6. Create the form rules
   
   
   
7. Set the field "Form" on the secondary data source to that of the current main datasource
   
   
8. To test if the current form, at a later point in time, is the same as the form when it was opened
   
   

Demo

1. On open, is the form the same as when we opened?
   
   
2. After some changes
   
   
3. Delete our changes - "true" again
   

How to use it

1. When a form is opened, use rules (or code) to set the default values in the secondary datasource
2. Through the lifetime of the form you can set the values to whatever you want, and use it in conditions
3. When the form closes it doesn't get saved

Benefits

1. You can track UI logic without actually modifying the main form
2. You can then use the string(.) trick to save the current form on form-load, then use that value to compare with the form at a later date to see if the form had been changed by the user
3. Some values, like "current user displayname" can be stored temporarily and is perfect for this
4. If you didn't like a temporary variable, just remove them or rename them.  Because they are not saved to the main data source, you don't have to worry about breaking existing or future forms.

WindowsPhone 7.5 Mango and Office 365

Adding an account

1. Go to settings | email + accounts | add an account | Outlook
2. Provide Office 365 login email and password
3. Once setup, the account will default to the name Outlook (or Outlook #)
4. In settings | email + accounts, tab the Outlook entry once and you’ll be able to change the name to something more meaningful, like Office 365

Office hub

1. Now in the Office hub, you can connect to your Office 365 account. 
2. The first time you login it will open a web browser control and ask you to login.  You can choose to remember login and password to skip this step in the future.
3. Once authenticated, you’ll see the a view of the lists and document libraries from your Office 365 team site

For those of us keeping itchy to write our own SharePoint - WindowsPhone applications, Microsoft cheated here and the web browser control used in step 2 is accessed via COM to obtain the cookiejar file, which contains the tokens for the Office hub to talk to Office 365.

SP2010 pretty up mysite with showModalDialog

Disclaimer: Totally, unsupported.

OK, that’s out of the way, let me describe the problem. 

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

The problem is, your users gets 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.

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

• Mysite remains totally un-branded, but now it is just demoted to an utility page
• Users are familiar with the SharePoint modal dialog, and can easily close the mysite 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.

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

$(document).ready(function(){

    window.oldSTSNavigate2 = window.STSNavigate2;
    window.STSNavigate2 = function (evt, Url){
        if (Url.indexOf("mysite") != -1) {
            SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
                url: Url + "#",
                title: "My Site",
                autoSize: true
            });
            return;
        }
        window.oldSTSNavigate2(evt, Url);
    };
});

STSNavigate2 is used by these out of the box menus:

Changes in SharePoint Client Object Model Redistributable SP1

Summary:

• Enum Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.RecycleBinItemType.Web was added in Silverlight Client Object Model SP1.  No other significant changes noted.
• This means old code using the previous version of the Client Object Model will work fine without recompilation.  Unless you happen to be doing stuff in the RecycleBin
• I wish I had my evening back

Microsoft’s SharePoint Client Object Model Redistributables

Microsoft announced that along with the latest shiny SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, they are also releasing an updated SharePoint Client Object Model Redistributable SP1.  These are the libraries for .NET and Silverlight that you can use to talk to SharePoint, without having actually installed SharePoint on your machine and pulling the same DLLs from the /ClientBin/ folder.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2508825

Figure: installing the redistributable.  Note the Cancel button is where you expect Next to be :-(

Once installed, they are hiding in

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SharePoint Client

Did anything actually change?  Do I have new secret goodies in the client object model?

Being the Silverlight and SharePoint fan that I am, I set about discovering what were the changes between the first RTM version of the Client Object Model vs. the Service Pack 1 version.

First thoughts were odd, but at least drove me onward:

Figure: RTM DLLs

Figure: SP1 DLLs

The striking thing was essentially, there are no differences in Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll – these are the .NET versions.

But there was a change in Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll – these are the Silverlight versions.

What’s also interesting was that the changes were done in October last year and guessing from the file size differences it doesn’t look like it was a major change.

Undeterred, I disassembled

Figure: Only minor changes in most of these files.

The only difference that is significant:

Figure: Additional Enum Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.RecycleBinItemType.Web added to Silverlight Client Object Model library

This raises an interesting question – so… this enum doesn’t exist in the .NET version of the DLLs?