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.

IANAL but I understand CC

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I understand CC, I think, I am not a lawyer.

I was encouraged by @aeoth's rant on twitter to add a license clarification to my blog, since I've always held the (c) which meant "all rights reserved".  Technically that means you need to discuss with me about the terms of copying materials you found on my site, on each individual basis.  Crazy!

So here's a clarification, ta-da!  Hopefully.

/about-me#legal

Specifically, I ask that:

  1. (-BY) If you are linking or referencing my notes or published code, please provide a link back to either the main site or the permalink.  For blogs and forums these are pretty standard, the only guys that don't do this properly are bots out to plagiarize other people's published work as their own.  For presentations or books, a reference link in the summary slide will be appreciated.
    (-SA) Because I would love to read your improvements on my work, I ask that your content is similarly shared in a open license (openly).  Essentially, if you publish and improve on my work, I would very much like to be able to read it as well.  This applies to published materials: e.g. forums, blogs, PowerPoint presentations, e-books, print.
    Hence, the slightly more restrictive -SA (share alike). 
  2. (-BY) If you are using my published code for production code, the -SA is removed, you may use all code unrestricted with CC-BY, that is, I ask you to link to the permalink in your code comments.  You do not have to share your code back to me.

The spirit of the license is to protect what I feel should be knowledge in the public domain, if you quote someone you should reference them, and if you want to borrow examples or slides from my presentation you should acknowledge it too, but feel free to do so.

At the same time, I don't want to tie anyone down with a restrictive code in their development.  If you need code, found mine, and it solves your problem, leave a link in comments for your colleagues, but you do not have to share your code or change the licensing terms of your code.

 

That's all, have fun, and I hope the intention is clear.

Finally, a note:

Since I'm not sure if I'm applying a more restrictive license on top of someone else's work by doing this, if I'm quoting your article and for some reason you'd like me to stop, let me know and we can work out what we should do.

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.