April 20, 2013

AutoSPInstaller: error while stopping the default web site in IIS

During an installation with AutoSPInstaller on my development machine I ran into a strange issue. I got the following error:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IIS.PowerShell.Framework’ or one of its dependencies

I haven’t found any other people having the same problem with the AutoSPInstaller, but I found a similar report on another forum: help.octopusdeploy.com. Maybe I am the only one who gets this error in AutoSPInstaller, if not it can be useful to write the solution down. The error occurs when the default web site in IIS is stopped. For some reason Get-WebSite cmdlet throws an exception the first time you invoke it, but not the second time. To get it working I followed the tip from the help.octopusdeploy.com and wrapped the Get-Website code in a try-and-catch, where the same cmdlet was in try and in catch. This line: [sourcecode language=“powershell”] $defaultWebsite = Get-Website | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq “Default Web Site” -or $_.ID -eq 1 -or $_.physicalPath -eq “%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot”} # Try different ways of identifying the Default Web Site, in case it has a different name (e.g. localized installs)[/sourcecode] becomes this code (the lines in try and catch are identical): [sourcecode language=“powershell”] Try{ $defaultWebsite = Get-Website | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq “Default Web Site” -or $_.ID -eq 1 -or $_.physicalPath -eq “%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot”} # Try different ways of identifying the Default Web Site, in case it has a different name (e.g. localized installs) } Catch [System.IO.FileNotFoundException]{ $defaultWebsite = Get-Website | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq “Default Web Site” -or $_.ID -eq 1 -or $_.physicalPath -eq “%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot”} Break }[/sourcecode] With this fix I was able to run the whole AutoSPInstaller script. My development machine was a fresh installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (without any updates). Leave a comment if you run into the same issue. If so, I’ll try to send a patch to the AutoSPInstaller code.

April 20, 2013

JQuery 2.0 - Notes About the Official Release

jQuery 2.0 leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster.

March 25, 2013

Multi-lingual "Last Modified" footer

You want to show when a page is last modified? The label should, of course, work in multi-language environment. For MOSS, there is a great article about how to achieve this: Jamie McAllister. Building a multi-lingual ‘Last Modified’ Footer for MOSS. Here is a simple example for doing the same in SharePoint 2013: [sourcecode language=“html”] <%@ Register TagPrefix=‘SharePointWebControls’ Namespace=‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls’ Assembly=‘Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ %> <SharePointWebControls:EncodedLiteral runat=‘server’ Text=’<%$Resources:cms,pagesettings_modifieddate_label%>’ EncodeMethod=‘HtmlEncode’/>: <SharePointWebControls:DateTimeField runat=“server” FieldName=“Modified” ControlMode=“Display”/> [/sourcecode] It fetches the localized value from cms.resx and puts it into your page as html.

February 24, 2013

On Windows keyboard layouts for minority languages in Russia

I can’t write in Chuvash in Windows 8 (and all the previous Windows releases). Chuvash is a minority language in Russian Federation. In this blog post I want to summarize the status of the keyboard layout support of the minority languages of Russia and find a way to improve this situation.

Languages and Microsoft

There are thousands of languages. Of course it is hard to support them all. As per 2012-02-21 Windows 8 supports 109 (!) languages. In december 2012 the support for Cheerokee language was added.

February 20, 2013

REST API: Add a plain text file as an attachment to a list item

SharePoint 2013 REST API has been enhanced and extended. The old _vti_bin/listdata.svc is still there, but the new api for working with lists and list items is much more and obviously a part of a bigger api: _api/web/lists Yesterday I saw an interesting question on SharePoint StackExchange:

“500: Internal Server Error” when trying to add a simple text file as an attachment via SharePoint 2013 REST API

The instructions in the MSDN resource are not so detailed, the cannot be. The guy who asked the question did as it stood in the examples. But sometimes solutions for SharePoint need some small adjustments :) Here is the simplest code to create an attachment in plain text for a list item 1 in the list called List1 in the root web. That’s it. But it works: [sourcecode language=“javascript”] var content = “Hello, this text is inside the file created with REST API”; var digest = $("#__REQUESTDIGEST").val(); var composedUrl = “/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle(‘List1’)/items(1)/AttachmentFiles/add(FileName=‘readme.txt’)”; $.ajax({ url: composedUrl, type: “POST”, data: content, headers: { “X-RequestDigest”: digest } }) [/sourcecode] This example is of course just for demonstration. It uses only hard-coded values. But it shows how simple it is to create a list item attachment using SharePoint 2013 REST API and “upload” plain text asynchronously to the server.

February 14, 2013

Error: Sorry, we're having trouble reaching the server

I ran into a an issue today. When I tried to add a user to a site in my SharePoint 2013 site, I got this error:

Sorry, we’re having trouble reaching the server

A google search gave these two possible solutions:

I know it can almost everything that can cause this error. Here are my two öre :) I found that when I tried to add a user, an ajax call was made. And this was the error:

February 6, 2013

SharePoint Modal Dialog as AngularJS directive

It has already become a series of posts in my blog about the combination of AngularJS and SharePoint:

And it will be more. Some of them are a pure angular stuff, some of them are really for SharePoint. In this post post I’ll show how to create a directive for a sharepoint modal dialog (SP.UI.ModalDialog). There is already a modal dialog implementation in the Angular UI project, but it uses the bootstrap modal dialog. But it custom attributes for angular">is not that hard to create an own directive for showing sharepoint modal dialogs. I’ve called the new directive ng-sp-modal (ngSpModal). Here is this: [sourcecode language=“javascript”] var ngSpModal = function() { link: function (scope, element, attrs, controller) { var dialog, defaults = { html: element.get(0), showClose: false }, getOptions = function () { var options = scope.$eval(attrs.ngSpModal); return angular.extend(defaults, options); }; fireSpModal: function (value) { if (value) { var opts = getOptions(); dialog = SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(opts); } else { dialog && dialog.close(); } }; // Watch for changes to the directives options scope.$watch(attrs.ngShow, fireSpModal, true); } return { require: ‘?ngShow’, link: link }; }; window.myApp = angular.module(‘myApp’, [‘ui.directives’]); myApp.directive(’ngSpModal’, [ngSpModal]); [/sourcecode] The new ng-sp-modal directive depends on ng-show. When your expression or value for ng-show for your html area is true, then a sharepoint modal dialog will open. This is achieved through a $watch command. The html area which is used to create will be copied to the modal dialog. I have used it for forms. To use it, just place this directive into your html element that you want be shown in a modal dialog. Here is a simple example to achieve what it is shown in the screenshot pasted above. [sourcecode language=“html”] Here is the html markup for your modal dialog [/sourcecode] Here is the very simple angular controller to let it work: [sourcecode language=“javascript”] function someCtrl($scope) { $scope.modalOptions = { height: 100, width: 300, title: “Yeah” }; } [/sourcecode]

February 1, 2013

JavaScript Localization in SharePoint

Yesterday Waldek Mastykarz published a cool post: Globalizing JavaScript in SharePoint 2013. This is a very cool technique to localize your client code in javascript and reuse your resx files in Server Side and Client Side. This is actually not new for SharePoint 2013 despite it has become more needed with the huge client focus in the new SharePoint. I have used this in SharePoint 2010 for a long time. In my blog post: ScriptResx.ashx in SharePoint I told about that technique. What I didn’t know that you can define your javascript namespace directly in the resx file. Waldek wrote in his comment that SP.Publishing.Resources.en-US.resx automatically are SP.Publishing.Resources in javascript. That was not the case for my own localization files. A simple look at SP.Publishing.Resources.en-US.resx helped: [sourcecode language=“xml”] true SP.Publishing.Resources [/sourcecode] This results in: [sourcecode language=“javascript”] _EnsureJSNamespace(‘SP.Publishing’); [/sourcecode] So what we have to do for our custom resx file is to add classFullName resheader: [sourcecode language=“xml”] Takana.Res [/sourcecode]

January 27, 2013

AngularJS: prevent form validation in Page Edit Mode

I work on a cool project where AngularJS is used for rendering of business data in a SharePoint portal. One of the beautiful parts of AngularJS is the client validation. AngularJS understands the new html5 attributes like “required” and pattern, which makes the markup and javascript concise and semantic. Recently I ran into a problem: The SharePoint webparts which had html forms with required fields were impossible to add to a page in the web browser, neither was it possible to edit the pages with these webparts. When I clicked on “Save”, the page tried to validate and failed. The solution for this is very elegant, like much of the AngularJS. If you don’t show your angular form, it won’t validate. So just use any method to detect the edit mode on a SharePoint page. I created a helper function for that. [sourcecode language=“javascript”] function isEditMode() { var publishingEdit = window.g_disableCheckoutInEditMode, form = document.forms[MSOWebPartPageFormName], input = form.MSOLayout_InDesignMode || form._wikiPageMode; return !!(publishingEdit || (input && input.value)); } [/sourcecode] In the angular controller, just define the part of it which shouldn’t be there when you are editing a page, by using ng-hide="editMode": [sourcecode language=“html”] [/sourcecode] editMode is a $scope variable in your controller. So the last thing to do is to get the editMode value by invoking the previously defined isEditMode function: [sourcecode language=“javascript”] function PhoneCallCtrl($scope, $http) { $scope.editMode = isEditMode(); } [/sourcecode]

January 4, 2013

angular jQuery UI autocomplete

Angular JS is one of the most developed MVC frameworks in the javascript world. Angular UI is a huge UI-centric extension of AngularJS (it is more or less like jQuery UI to the jQuery). It uses much jQuery UI and Twitter Bootstrap and provides many own components like modal dialogs, maps, tooltips, masked inputs and much more. And all this is easy to implement in your code just by adding a directive: [sourcecode language=“html”][/sourcecode] Much cleaner than listening on $(document).ready, traversing the DOM and appending the datepicker in your code: [sourcecode language=“html”][/sourcecode] [sourcecode language=“javascript”]$(document).ready(function() { var input = $("#myDate"); input.datepicker(); });[/sourcecode] All this code is invoked but outside your app code.