Category Archives: sharepoint

documenting my love affair with Microsoft SharePoint

Fix Modal Dialog Size in SharePoint 2010

I’ve been using Kyle Schaeffer’s V5 Master Page as a pretty good starter template for a lot of my stuff recently. But I kept running across an issue. My modal dialog boxes weren’t being sized correctly. So upon further investigation, I realized it was just a bit of CSS that was being applied to dialogs where it shouldn’t be. I’m not sure if it was my fault, or something in the original file. So at the end of my CSS file I put the following code and everything works great!


/* fix the modal to resize correctly

********************************************************** */

.ms-dialog body #s4-workspace {padding:0px;overflow:auto !important;}

.ms-dialog body #s4-ribbonrow {position:relative;}

.ms-dialog #isb-wrapper {margin:0px;}

Change down arrow on SharePoint dynamic menu

This is nothing super special, but if you want to change the drop-down menu arrow in global navigation to a different image, here’s how:

.menu-horizontal a.dynamic-children span.additional-background,
.menu-horizontal span.dynamic-children span.additional-background {
background-image:url('images/menu-down.png');
}

 


“Connect to Outlook” produces hundreds of status changes to Calendar Events

We’re having an issue recently where, when a user with write permissions syncs their calendar to outlook, it will occasionally change items by itself. I’ll see if I can explain one scenario where I know it happened:

  1. A user had write permissions
  2. Approval was turned on (luckily)
  3. He logged into his account from a different computer on the network
  4. He opened up Outlook 2010
  5. I received over 200 notifications of calendar items being changed
  6. I checked the approve/reject items view of the calendar, and literally ALL of the calendar items had been set to “pending.” It seemed that no details had been changed, but I had to either approve or reject all of his “changes”. This user had never even used the calendar on outlook (although, I do believe it was synced somehow).

I thought this was a one-off scenario, but recently we trained about a dozen people to manage the master calendar by syncing it to their outlook, and a similar thing happened. This time it was only about 60 events on the calendar that were changed, but I can’t figure it out. Even the “Modified” date field hadn’t changed. So the event has not changed, just the item itself has changed status somehow.

Has anyone else run across this? I’ll take this to sharepoint.stackexchange.com as well…click here to see/answer the question.


Guest article on SharePoint’s “Get the Point” blog

I recently published an article on Microsoft SharePoint’s end user blog, “Get the Point.” The article covers steps on how to enhance a SharePoint blog with pictures. And as a follow up, check out this other post on my site showing how to correctly setup permissions for a blog.


SPServices example: populate a drop-down menu

Here’s a fairly basic tutorial on how to populate a drop-down menu (select menu) using the jQuery library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) .

First, let’s setup our body with one simple, empty, html “select” tag:

<select class="list-selector"></select>

Next, up in the head of our document, we need to call 2 scripts. First, jQuery itself, and then the SPServices library:

<script src="/Style Library/scripts/jquery-1.6.4.min.js"></script>
<script src="/Style Library/scripts/jquery.SPServices-0.7.0.min.js"></script>

And now for the good part. We’re going to call a function that pulls every list title in our site and creates a new option for each one in our drop-down menu.

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
        //begin getLists function
        function getList(){
            $().SPServices({
                operation:"GetListCollection",
                webURL: $(this).attr("WebFullUrl"),
                async:false,
                completefunc: function(xData, Status) {
                    $(xData.responseXML).find("List").each(function(){
                        listTitle = $(this).attr("Title");
                        listItem = "<option>" + listTitle + "</option>"
                        $("select.list-selector").append(listItem);
                    })
                }
            })
        } // end function
        getList();
    }); // end document ready
</script>

You can see, after the “GetListCollection” operation is complete, we create a new variable called “listTitle” and give it the “Title” attribute of the list. Then we create another variabled called “listItem” that includes the surrounding “option” tags as well as the first “listTitle” variable we created. This entire variable is then appended to the select list.

Voila!


SharePoint in Education: an online scheduling solution for conferences

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I wanted to give a little preview of a SharePoint 2010 scheduling solution we’re building for a school. The goals of the project are:

  • Online reservation process for parent-teacher conferences
  • Email alerts upon booking, cancellation, and 24hrs before appointment
  • Ability for teachers to block off times where parents can’t come in
  • Hooked into Active Directory so it knows who is logged in
  • Repeatable and scalable

Some of the methods to the madness

  1. Use stripped down .aspx pages
  2. Hook up jQuery Mobile, and jQuery for SPServices
  3. Create individual lists per teacher (from a list template we’ve made)
  4. Create workflows for list actions
  5. …

Once we’re done I’ll post a video of the full, working solution for you to check out. If you’re needing something like this for your school or workplace, let me know!