SharePoint Saturday Melbourne update

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I had a pleasure of flying down and presenting at the SharePoint Saturday Melbourne event.  Had a great time, met many new people and presented my talk on Custom Rest Services and jQuery AJAX, hope you guys enjoyed it.

Highlights for the presentation were the number of people that put up their hands saying they will try this in their environment - that was very encouraging - it's all fairly simple when you look at the result in small chunks.  Thank you guys.

 

The links to the PowerPoint presentation and the demo solution are here:

 

Because I ran out of time (sorry), the bits that I missed were:

  • The 3rd service factory in SharePoint 2010 is for the DataService, allowing you to connect any Entity Framework objects directly into a REST service end-point with almost no code.
  • The 3 service factories are not available in SharePoint 2007, this makes writing services VERY COMPLEX and I don't recommend doing it in 2007.  But you are not out of luck, JavaScript can call the 2007 SOAP services, as long as the correct SOAP envelop is formed before the POST call.  Luckily there are awesome people that has done most of this work: http://spservices.codeplex.com/
  • IMPORTANT: I did not explain what the jQuery.ajax's cache: false argument is.  This is very important.  When you call a REST service via a URL, if you do not very the URL/Query string, your browser will return you the same data that it has downloaded previously, and give you a cached copy.  This can be really bad since your service isn't actually called.  jQuery gets around this by appending a random number at the end of the query string, like this:

    image
    ?_=12312123

    This ensures the query string is unique and browser's cache mechanism won't interfere.  HTTP Response code 200 is success.  Rather than 304 which is browser cache.

SSPUG - REST Service and jQuery AJAX

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As promised, the PowerPoint and solution files for my session for the Sydney SharePoint User Group October session.

 

Sorry I spelt "Summery" wrong.  I'm sure I copied it from another slide by mistake.

Files

Related Links

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.

SharePoint - Starting Site Workflows Manually

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We probably all know that SharePoint 2010 allows you to create a new type of workflow: Site Workflow, these workflows are not bound to a list.  Site workflows are perfect for those one-off jobs that you'd trigger manually.

What's not obvious, to me initially, as well as to many other people, is how does a user actually start one off?

Here's the solution, in one picture, I bet half of you have never noticed this before even though it's always been there from the very beginning.

image

Hacking SP.UI.ModalDialog to download ReportServer PDF

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We have a situation where we want to let our users click a report server link, but the report can take (depending on parameters) anywhere between 5 to 30 seconds to create and export as PDF.

Here's how you can "hack" some JavaScript to make the experience better.

 

Use SP.UI.ModalDialog

function do_modal(url, title, callback) {
    var options = {
        url: url,
        title: title,
        showClose: true
    }
    if (callback) {
        options.dialogReturnValueCallback = Function.createDelegate(null, callback);
    }
    return SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options);
}

 

This lets me call the Report Server URL via:

var d = do_modal(url, title);

I'm catching the dialog object, because I want to do a few more things.

 

Pesky IsDlg=1

Report Server is very perculiar with the Query paramaters passed in, and SP Modal Dialog likes to add a IsDlg=1 to the query string, this doesn't play well. 

image

"An attempt was made to set a report parameter 'IsDlg' that is not defined in this report.  (rsUnknownReportParameter)"

You can fix this two ways, first, if you have access to report server, you can just add a unused optional parameter IsDlg. 

If you don't have access to report server, you now need to hack the ModalDialog, which is what I did next.

 

Give me an IFrame, and I will give you a SRC

var f = d.get_frameElement();
f.src = url; // remove IsDlg=1

 

I ask for the IFrame object created by the dialog, and then brute force the SRC attribute to my url.  This undo the extra IsDlg appended by the ModalDialog.

 

Awesome, my report is now being downloaded, while the user waits with a nice friendly modal popup :-)

image

 

But wait, hmm, big problem...  screen is stuck

:-(

image

Because the PDF file is downloaded, the browser never receives the signal to stop and dispose the Modal Dialog.  Now the site is stuck.  Which brings us to my final trick.

 

Manually attach and watch the IFrame, and dispose the dialog when we're done

var t = function() {
    // ready state goes from "loading" to "interactive"
    if (f.readyState != 'loading') {
        d.close(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel);
        return;       
    }
    setTimeout(t, 2000);       
};

setTimeout(t, 2000);

 

Let's define a function t, we'll be watching the readyState property of the IFrame object.  When it is no longer loading, we'll close the modal dialog.  Wait and recalculate every 2 seconds until this happens.

Here's the MSDN article on IFrame.readyState

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534359(v=VS.85).aspx

One of the more interesting thing is that when you are downloading a PDF, the readyState remains in the "interactive" state, and never reaches the "loaded" state.  This is the reason a loaded() event doesn't fire, and thus the default SharePoint ModalDialog doesn't know we're done and need to fix itself.

 

Everything in one go:

 

    var d = do_modal(url, title);
    var f = d.get_frameElement();
    f.src = url; // remove IsDlg=1
    var t = function() {
        // ready state goes from "loading" to "interactive"
        if (f.readyState != 'loading') {
            d.close(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel);
            return;       
        }
        setTimeout(t, 2000);       
    };    
    setTimeout(t, 2000);

Not many lines of javascript, with an awesome result.

InfoPath - an example of using an XML file for special characters

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This is an old trick relating to inserting special characters (such as carriage returns) and tricking InfoPath to stop removing them! 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/infopath/archive/2005/03/04/385577.aspx

I've decided to take some screenshots to show what you should be expecting when you apply this technique.

 

The XML file

image

 

The Data Connection

image

image

 

A formula to use it

image

The advanced Xpath is:

concat("my", xdXDocument:GetDOM("characters")/lookups/characters/@crlf, "hello", xdXDocument:GetDOM("characters")/lookups/characters/@crlf, "world")

 

Result - Rich Client

image

 

Result - Web Browser Form

image

 

The HTML generated in the browser form is:

<TEXTAREA ...>my
hello
world</TEXTAREA>

 

Notice it has the correct carriage returns creating the new lines.

 

The example XSN file if you want to download it and have some fun

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30fe4b030eeeef0a0ca/1318394572343/crlf.xsn