AUSPC 2012 summary

I had an awesome time presenting Building your own custom REST Services and consuming them with jQuery AJAX in the Australian SharePoint Conference 2012.  A big thank you to the developers that came and geeked out with me for an hour on a Wednesday afternoon.

Notes

When you build a custom WCF Service using the CKS template, it is deployed to a subfolder the web front end's ISAPI folder, which, in turn, is mapped to the site's /_vti_bin/ folder.

It appears that in my earlier attempt to create an incomplete version of the REST service template item, I interfered with how CKS's templates worked - and correct features for deploying the WCF service is no longer being included in the package.  While existing items were updated and deployed, the new WCF service that I was creating wasn't being deployed to the ISAPI folder.

I've removed the REST template item from my Visual Studio .NET environment, and voila - the WCF services deployed nicely once again.

So that's one mystery resolved.  Now I scratch my head about how to fix my VS.NET REST template item.

Downloads

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30ee4b030eeeef09bc7/1316868647487/SPGSvcWp.zip
• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30ee4b030eeeef09bc8/1332310261028/SharePoint+REST+and+jQuery4.pptx

AUSPC 2012 quick update

I'm in the strange and calm interlude between day 1 and day 2 of awesomeness in the annual Australian SharePoint Conference (AUSPC) 2012.

Day 1 has been a lot of fun.  Manned the user group booth in the morning with Dan Brown.  Met many of the SharePoint guys in the community that I haven't seen for the last 6 month to a year.  Talked to a number of vendors, and attended a number of awesome sessions on the developer track.

I also got to sit on the panel answering developer questions amongst the legends like Nick Hadlee, Ishai Sagi, Brian Farnhill and Jeremy Thake

The oddest part is probably with MCA SharePoint Wayne Ewington sitting in the audience.  Every time we said something silly he'd start shaking his head and we'd all stop.  Hilarious.

Tomorrow morning, my session on Building your own custom REST Service and consuming them with jQuery AJAX is running in the developer track at 10:30am.  Hope to see everyone there.

All my related resources and presentations on this topic are summarized on /rest

Knockout binding formatters for date and currency

Dependency

• Requires Knockout
• jQuery (for setting text())
• ASP.NET (for the formatting functions).

ko.bindingHandlers.date = {
    update: function(element, valueAccessor, allBindingsAccessor) {
        var value = valueAccessor(), allBindings = allBindingsAccessor();
        var valueUnwrapped = ko.utils.unwrapObservable(value);
       
        var d = "";
        if (valueUnwrapped) {
            var m = /Date\([\d+-]+\)/gi.exec(valueUnwrapped);
            if (m) {
                d = String.format("{0:dd/MM/yyyy}", eval("new " + m[0]));
            }
        }       
        $(element).text(d);   
    }
};
ko.bindingHandlers.money = {
    update: function(element, valueAccessor, allBindingsAccessor) {
        var value = valueAccessor(), allBindings = allBindingsAccessor();
        var valueUnwrapped = ko.utils.unwrapObservable(value);
       
        var m = "";
        if (valueUnwrapped) {       
            m = parseInt(valueUnwrapped);
            if (m) {
                m = String.format("{0:n0}", m);
            }
        }       
        $(element).text(m);   
    }
};

Usage:

• data-bind="money: myMoney"
• data-bind="date: myDate"

Note:

Dates are converted from ASP.NET's date format: \/Date(1000+1000)\/

InfoPath - creating sequential filenames without an extra column

Avid InfoPath form creators will no doubt know the trick to create sequential numbers for use in filenames.  The steps typically includes:

1. Create a field FileName, create another field SeqNo.
2. Publish the form to SharePoint Form library, and promote the column for SeqNo
3. Create a view, use REST data connection or use owssrv.dll to get data from this Form library, in particular we want to know the SeqNo
4. Prior to save, check that the FileName is not blank, query the data connection to find the latest SeqNo from the forms library.  Using max()
5. Add one to this number, store it in SeqNo
6. Create FileName by concatenating some prefix with SeqNo:  MyFile-004
7. Submit through a data connection back to the Form library with the FileName

This blog post is NOT about using a second column

We will work out the next number completely without promoting any fields.

WHY, you may ask.  Well, because it's FUN!

And we get to play with a modified double-eval trick as a bonus!

Set up

• Create a basic form, create a field filename
• Publish to SharePoint Form library

Secondary data source for querying existing filenames

Create a SharePoint connection to the Form library.

Here I'm creating a SharePoint List data connection.  The old trick with owssrv.dll will work as well.

Secondary data source for submit (to save forms)

Another SharePoint connection to the Form library, this one is for submit.  Allow overwrite.  Also, use the filename field for saving.

Save button

Create a save button.  When the user clicks save, we're going to create a new filename with a sequential number, then call the submit data connection.

Our secondary data looks like this:

I drop this onto the form to show what is the data in this data connection.

What we want to do, is to take the names, strip out all the non-numeric characters, and then perform a max() operation to find the largest number.

Stripping characters with TRANSLATE

InfoPath has a useful function translate("abc", "ABC") it replaces the first set of characters with the second set.  If your second set is empty, like this: translate("abc", "") you can essentially perform a character removal.

And now, I can use my translate function like this:

Run the form in preview: we are now left with just the the numbers in the filename.  Good.

Double-eval

Back to our list of existing form names. 

The double-eval trick essentially gives us a way to do a for-each parse through a repeating section in InfoPath.

The basic form this is:

The inner-eval, runs "." (current), and the outer-eval, runs ".." (parent).   Combined, this gives us a concatenated string of all the Title

Combine both the translate strip, and the double-eval, we get:

Preview:

Finally, replace the outer-eval with a max function, and prefix a 0 (for filenames that don't have numbers).

max(eval(Title, 'concat("0", translate(., "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -+,_!.", ""))'))

Preview result:

So my filename function is this:

concat("form-", max(eval(Title, 'concat("0", translate(., "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -+,_!.", ""))')) + 1 )

Here's the form running in Form Server

Download

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30fe4b030eeeef09eca/1329912112443/SequentialFileForm.xsn

SSPUG retrospective: Creating Knockout user experiences in SharePoint with JavaScript

I had an absolute blast presenting Knockout, AJAX, jQuery, SP2010 REST services, and spservices tonight at the February 2012 Sydney SharePoint user group.

The turn out was awesome, and I want to thank you guys for the great questions and the awesome attention for listening me talk about this stuff, with great excitement, for 1.5 hours.

This is what we built, not bad, in 90 minutes ;-)

Great questions:

Why do you need to call ko.utils.unwrapObservable for the key function? 

This is actually pretty important, and I didn't explain it very well until I thought about it afterwards.

The reason is that I believe Knockout is actually building a dependency graph when you use knockout expressions and compute functions.  If you use data.Id() - you will actually set up a dependency chain between the knockout viewmodel and the key function.  I can't imagine it would be disastrously bad - since you don't bind the key function to the UI, but it is an unnecessary performance hit.

What do you do with the formatting?

The easiest way, I think, is to build a compute function and then return the value you want in the right format you wanted it.  Knockout itself doesn't contain formatting functions, and I think it will probably be implemented as an separate plugin.

ASP.NET's built in JavaScript, which is available in SharePoint, contains a lot of formatting functions for rendering both currency and dates. 

A separate, slightly prettier technique, is to add additional binding handlers (aka, the text:, html:, value: expressions), and create a new binding expression that also does formatting.  In my projects, I've used

• money: MyCurrency
• date: MyDate

These are one-way binding, because I'm lazy, but you can make them two-way as well if you want to handle the parsing.

Downloads

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30ee4b030eeeef09ae6/1329820720137/Creating+Knockout+User+Experiences+in+SharePoint+with+JavaScript_sspug201202.pptx
• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5527bff2e4b0b430660b0d10/5527c30de4b030eeeef09715/5527c30ee4b030eeeef09ae7/1329820714717/knockout-rest-sspug-201202.zip

Next Presentations

No idea, but I plan to be presenting this for the rest of the year in the various SharePoint Saturdays, so bring your colleagues for a exciting session on a very cool, new technique.