One of X number of colums must contain data - sharepoint

HI all,
I am creating a timesheep app and I have five colums that can contain hours worked. When the user enters a new form how do I check to see if at least one of the columns contains data. I must admit I am not a developer just a Sharepoint/Sharepoint designer hack so be nice. Thanks
Glenn Thibeault

The only bullet-proof way would be to create a SharePoint event receiver using C# (lots of examples on the web).
I'm not really sure how you could accomplish this with SPD.
If you don't want to write any C# code, that really only leaves JavaScript. It will still take development work (this is a programming site after all). You could probably take advantage of SPUtility.js (full disclosure, this is a library I maintain).
The basic steps would be:
Edit your NewForm.aspx and add a Content Editor web part
Inside the Content Editor web part, write your JavaScript:
Attach a new onClick handler to the NewForm.aspx's "OK" buttons
Use SPUtility's GetValue method to get the value of your 5 fields, validate one has a value, and display a message if invalid

Related

One custom display form for all the lists

Good day to you. I am newbie in SharePoint 2013 so please bear with me. I have created around 15 lists in my website each containing same columns but different data (they differ semantically).
I am aware that we can change the default view, edit and display form for each list by creating new form in SharePoint Designer 2013. This seems like a very bad approach as far as the maintenance is concerned. I know my lists are exactly the same so why do I have to create same 15 display forms for each of the lists?
Is there a way to create one custom Display form (may be in a central location, i don't know i am just thinking :P ) for all the lists? Is there a way to tell a list to use a specific display form? Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks.
If i understand your question correctly, you have 15 lists with same set of columns. You want to change the display/look of the form. All 15 lists should have same look and feel right!! If yes, then why don't you try with some html, javascript solution. Since you are in sharepoint 2013, javascript support for solutions is very good like rest queries. You can use SPServices also.
If you want to to add data to the list whenever you click on the "New Item" link in the list then hijack this link such that it should navigate to your custom form. Pass your list name as query parameter. Whenever user is saving the form, get the list name from the query parameter and save the data to that list.
There could be another ways also to achieve the solution with html and javascript.
Useful links:
Microsoft, Microsoft, SPServices
Sam I think you can create a custom content type and create custom display form for your content type. Enable the content type in each of your lists so automatically this customized form would be available.
The advantage of this approach is that suppose if you need one more list after some time you can just add this content type and your form would be available into the new list as well.
The approach is explained in the link below.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/varun_malhotra/archive/2009/06/06/define-custom-new-edit-display-forms-for-content-types.aspx
Check this one also
https://joshmccarty.com/2011/02/sharepoint-custom-list-with-custom-content-types-and-custom-display-forms/
Just wanted to write the solution which I implemented as it might help others as well. (Thanks Hiren and Mihir for your valuable inputs)
I had 15 lists and I was showing the data to the user using content search web part with custom display template. All of the lists were using the same display template so I made a new page just to show the item details. In the display template I pointed the item URL (i hijacked the list name and the current item id) to my new page and displayed the item. Let me know if anyone is interested in the whole solution or further elaboration is required.

SharePoint 2013 KnockoutJS Lookup columns

I have a basic knockoutjs project loading data from a SharePoint 2013 list scenario. Getting data and displaying data is easy, the problem that I'm running into is on the edit mode displaying the proper control. Everything should not be a textbox. This means the people picker control to dropdownmenus to calendar controls.
MSFT has some pretty good documentation on using the client side people picker control here"http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj713593.aspx
The problem that I have is calling this control inside my viewmodel.
Setting the value of the control doesn't look difficult courtesy of this blog post: http://www.sharepointcolumn.com/sp2013-setting-people-picker-value-in-newform-aspx/
I attempted to looking into computed values, but that doesn't seem to work. Does anyone have a blog post that I skipped over? The closest related post that I can find: http://yetanothersharepointblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/working-with-sharepoint-lookup-columns-in-knockout-js/
Lastly since it seems that I'm the only one doing this, does anyone think that I should not be reinventing the wheel with my forms and should just link each item to the appropriate SharePoint list item in edit or display view? I suppose that would be easier.
From a SharePoint Professional to another, I would highly recommend you to do that.
Just redirect the user to the item edit/display item page an let SharePoint take the leash of how to handle UI form elements.
Because, assume that you implement your custom form, what if the user decides to add one more site column to the list? Will you update your code to support another field?
From my personal experience with the beast I've come to the conclusion that structural implementation over already existent functionality tends to go wrong.
Also, if you have some kind of listing of items custom made and you want to provide editing, try to do something opening a pretty SP.UI.ModalDialog, its elegant and you use the sharepoint to do the work for you.
But it's just an advise.

How to integrate a "shortcode" feature in Sharepoint wikis

I would like to "customize" my sharepoint wiki by doing something very simple.
I would like to be able to run a regex on wiki pages looking for [math] and [\math] tags, then take the expression written in the middle (assume this value is stored in a variable x) and replace the whole block by
"<img src='http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?" + x +"'/>"
So for example, the shortcode [math]a^2+b^2=c^2[\math] should end up being displayed as an image as follows (thanks to this online tool):
I have never developed anything in sharepoint, and I've been using it for a week.
Can anybody tell me how I should proceed to add such a feature (if it's possible)?
You can use existing solution like ShortPoint.
Sure - this is simmply done via two methods - 1) You could modify the page directly using SharePoint designer - fly in the code where you want it, 2) The better way - add your code to text file, upload the text file to a document library then use the Content Editor web part, drop it on the page, point it (through the properties) to the text file.
Note: The Content Editor part will allow you to modify the background HTML/Script, however, it has a nasty habit of overriding your code and I've had it actually duplicate itself (adding repeat scripts). Using the Text file eliminiates that issue.
If i understand you correctly, I don't think that the content editor web part is the solution you are looking for. I believe you are wanting to implement a shortcodes solution such as that found in WordPress, correct? In that case, the issue becomes a bit more complex. To really get any kind of custom code that would execute at the necessary stages, you would need a custom solution either implementing additional functionality in the existing rich text editor, or roll your own custom rich text editor.
At that point, you would have complete control over how the content is parsed and interpreted, so you could have both server-side and client side processing. You could make use of templating engines like mustache or handlebars.
To do this, you would need to write your own Custom field type, inherit from SPFieldMultiLineText, override the property FieldRenderingControl, and return your custom control. That way you have the option of implementing it in several different places (custom pege fields in a page layout, custom webparts, custom lists, etc.) and you still get the benefits you want from the out-of-the-box control.

Multiple Sharepoint Forms

I am trying to split out what I originally wanted in a single form. The downside was that I wanted to keep multiple lists and I found that I could not use a single form with multiple lists.
What I am trying to do is to keep my customer information in a separate list/form so I can re-use it in a different application as well.
What I would like to do is give a picker to pick the customer from a list, and if the customer is not listed to allow the creation of a new one.
What I am wondering is how I can leave the main form, create the new customer, and then return to the main form but with the new customer information passed to the new form as selected. In ASP.NET one of the ways I would do this is through the querystring, but I am not sure if that is doable or preferred in Sharepoint.
Any thoughts or links to tutorials would be great.
Please keep in mind that due to access/security limitations I am trying to do this strictly through the browser and Sharepoint Designer.
Thanks!
With your access limitations, I don't see a solution that will allow the refresh of the original form to get the new data. You may be able to hack in some JQuery stuff to do this, but I just don't see it being an easy/value-for-time thing to do.
You may just have to allow the form user to save the form without customer info and come back to it.
A list view can then highlight forms with no customer info. This all depends on the usage scenario.
You can use the Source query string parameter to get you back to the original form after completing the new customer form. However, unless you add some code (either javascript or server side) you won't get the id of the new customer.
The best option is probably using jquery and the sharepoint web services. It's quite easy if you start with the right scripts, and you can do something like your original plan - make a simple form in a jquery ui popup.
You can also use javascript to manage linking between multiple forms, but you need to be careful about clearing out already entered form data.
Another option would be to edit dispform.aspx and add dataviews for other lists, along with appropriate add buttons, and add javascript to the new customer form that sets the value of a connecting lookup field. However, that tends to require quite a bit of messing about with list guids and other undocumented bits.

SharePoint SPContext.List in a custom application page

I have a custom SharePoint application page deployed to the _layouts folder. It's a custom "new form" for a custom content type. During my interactions with this page, I will need to add an item to my list. When the page first loads, I can use SPContext.Current.List to see the current list I'm working with. But after I fill in my form and the form posts back onto itself and IsPostBack is true, then SPContext.Current.List is null so I can't find the list that I need to add my stuff into.
Is this expected?
How should I retain some info about my context list across the postback? Should I just populate some asp:hidden control with my list's guid and then just pull it back from that on the postback? That seems safe, I guess.
FWIW, this is the MOSS 2007 Standard version.
Generally speaking I try and copy whatever approach the product group has taken when looking to add functionality of my own. In this case they add their own edit/view/add pages via the list definition itself.
I built a solution that also needed its own custom "New" form, not open source unfortunately, though if you are interested you can download it, its called "Tagged Links" (Social Bookmarking for SharePoint) and you can find some links on my blog.
To give you a few hints and tips, the following should set you off in the right direction:
Created a new list definition.
Created a new Content Type In the content type you can define your own "FormTemplates" that references a Rendering Template which determine what gets displayed in the "Middle" bit of those forms.
Copied the standard Rendering Template, but then made the changes to it that I
needed.
Wrapped it all up in a solution, and deployed.
My Rendering Template actually included an overridden "Save" Button where I did a lot of the extra work I needed to do during the save.
Anyway, it is a little too much work in my opinion but, I think, it most closely matches the standard approach taken by the product developers. Let me know if you need more detail and I will see if I can put together a step-by-step blog post, but hopefully this gets you off on the right direction.
I would be surprised if you could do something in a _Layouts file that you can't do in a forms template. You have pretty much the same technologies at your disposal.
Looking at the way SharePoint works with ListItems and Layouts pages (for example "Manage Permissions" on a list item), I can see that they pass some variables in via querystrings:
?obj={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423},6,LISTITEM&List={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423}
Perhaps they grab the context back each time programmatically using these values.
I'm not using a custom "new form", so this might not apply. I added an event receiver to my custom content type and then do my custom code in the ItemAdded or ItemAdding events. This code fires when the event is added to a list. You can use the event receiver properties to get to the parent List, Web, and Site.
I'd like to think my issue is "special" here, since I am using a custom form. I chose to use a custom form rather than a custom FormTemplate simply because I'm doing a lot of stuff that's not very SharePoint list-like (making ajax calls to get info from a third-party app then generating some dynamic form elements based on that ajax result, then subsequent processing of that data on postback). I thought it'd be a nightmare to try this within the usual custom rendering template mechanism.
I also don't think I can supply the custom form declarations in the list definition itself, because I have multiple content types associated with this list, and each content type has its own custom form (the other type is thankfully much simpler).
Actually, my simple way of keeping the list guid in my hidden field was a very low impact way to address this specific problem. My main concern is that I'm not sure why the SPContext just loses all its usefulness when I postback here, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong.

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