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.

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:

<input ui-date>

Much cleaner than listening on $(document).ready, traversing the DOM and appending the datepicker in your code:

Ellipsis (…) is a character which indicates that the content is to wide. There are many solutions to truncate the text and show an ellipsis: in javascript and css. I want to share my humble function which extends the String.prototype:

String.prototype.ellipsize = function (maxLength) {
  maxLength = maxLength || 100;
  if (this.length <= maxLength) {
    return this;
  }
  var text = this.toString()
    .replace(/[\r\n]/g,
      ""), max = maxLength, min = maxLength - 20,
    elipsized, tryExtract = function () {
      var regex = new RegExp("^.{" + min + "," + max + "}\\s"),
        match = text.match(regex);
      if (match) {
        elipsized = match[0].replace(/\.?\s$/, '…');
      }
      else {
        //well, there were no \s between min and max
        min = min - 20;
        tryExtract();
      }
    };
  if (min <= 0) {
    return text;
  }
  tryExtract();
  return elipsized || text;
};

To use it, just call the function from a string property in your favorite templating engine: Angular, jsRender, Knockout….:

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 54,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 12 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

comments from wordpress

Justin Cooney — 2013-01-03

Congratulations on a great 2012 for your blog. All the best for 2013!

by Chris Love [slideshare id=15218139&doc=webperformanceoptimizationformodernwebapplications-121116224847-phpapp01]

For a while ago I needed to copy all files from a document library within a SharePoint 2007 site to the hard drive. So I didn’t need to copy files from SharePoint to SharePoint so I couldn’t use the stsadm -o export command or Chris O’Brien’s nice SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard. I came across the SPIEFolder application which should work with SharePoint 2007 and 2010. It has a site on codeplex: spiefolder.codeplex.com, but neither the binary nor the source code can be downloaded from there. After some searching I found the binary in the author’s skydrive. The fact that the source code was not available seemed as an disanvantage because I could not know what code was run. Nevertheless I tried it out and it didn’t work:

PowerShell is a great tool. It helps in SharePoint administration and tasks automation. Today I needed to provision a webpart on many similar pages. This third-party webpart’s constructor instantiates a dataaccess service and uses a connectionstring which is stored in the web.config file. So the webpart creation failed until I found a way to load the configuration into powershell. First you can create a simple file powershell.exe.config, put it into $pshome (C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0). In that file you can specify the connectionstring in the same way like in the web.config (or app.config). But it is not secure: the connectionstring can be changed in the future, and you really don’t want to copy your connectionstrings around. So there is a better way: Check out Ohad Israeli’s blog post about how a configuration file can be bound dynamically in a .net assembly: Binding to a custom App.Config file. In PowerShell you can do the same, all we need is to modify the syntax: StackOverflow: Powershell Calling .NET Assembly that uses App.config:

Thanks to Ryan for sharing powershell functions. I used New-SPGroup which I altered. Now You can define which permissions will be given to the new group. You can even create groups without default users. Here it comes:

 
function New-SPGroup {
<#
.Synopsis
	Use New-SPGroup to create a SharePoint Group.
.Description
	This function uses the Add() method of a SharePoint RoleAssignments property in an SPWeb to create a SharePoint Group.
.Example
New-SPGroup -Web http://intranet -GroupName "Test Group" -OwnerName DOMAIN\\User -MemberName DOMAIN\\User2 -Description "My Group" -Role "Read"
	This example creates a group called "Test Group" in the http://intranet site, with a description of "My Group".  The owner is DOMAIN\\User and the first member of the group is DOMAIN\\User2 and adds "Limited Access".
	C:\\PS>New-SPGroup -Web http://intranet -GroupName "Test Group" -OwnerName DOMAIN\\User -MemberName DOMAIN\\User2 -Description "My Group" -Role "Read"
	This example creates a group called "Test Group" in the http://intranet site, with a description of "My Group".  The owner is DOMAIN\\User and the first member of the group is DOMAIN\\User2 and adds "Read" access.
	Pay attention to the role definition names. They must be provided in the language of your site.
.Notes
	Name: New-SPGroup
	Author: Ryan Dennis, Anatoly Mironov
	Last Edit: 2012-11-05
	Keywords: New-SPGroup, spgroup, permissions
.Link
	http://www.sharepointryan.com
 	http://twitter.com/SharePointRyan
	https://sharepointkunskap.wordpress.com
.Inputs
	None
.Outputs
	None
#Requires -Version 2.0
#>
	\[CmdletBinding()\]
	Param(
	\[Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPWebPipeBind\]$Web,
	\[string\]$GroupName,
	\[string\]$OwnerName,
	\[string\]$MemberName,
	\[string\]$Role,
	\[string\]$Description
	)
	$SPWeb = $Web.Read()
	if ($SPWeb.SiteGroups\[$GroupName\] -ne $null){
		throw "Group $GroupName already exists!"	
	}

	if ($Role) {
		$roleDefinition = $SPWeb.RoleDefinitions\[$Role\]
		if (!$roleDefinition) {
			throw "Role Definition $Role doesn't exist!"
		}
	}

	if ($SPWeb.Site.WebApplication.UseClaimsAuthentication){
		$op = New-SPClaimsPrincipal $OwnerName -IdentityType WindowsSamAccountName
		$owner = $SPWeb | Get-SPUser $op
		if ($MemberName) {
			$mp = New-SPClaimsPrincipal $MemberName -IdentityType WindowsSamAccountName
			$member = $SPWeb | Get-SPUser $mp
		}
	}
	else {
	$owner = $SPWeb | Get-SPUser $OwnerName
		if ($MemberName) {
			$member = $SPWeb | Get-SPUser $MemberName
		}
	}

	$SPWeb.SiteGroups.Add($GroupName, $owner, $member, $Description)
	$SPGroup = $SPWeb.SiteGroups\[$GroupName\]	
	$roleAssignment = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleAssignment($SPGroup)
	if ($Role) {
		$roleAssignment.RoleDefinitionBindings.Add($roleDefinition)
	}
	$SPWeb.RoleAssignments.Add($roleAssignment)
	$SPWeb.Dispose()
	return $SPGroup
}

I have used AngularJS for a while and to me this seems to be the best MVC javascript framework. Today I wanted to implement a search which uses an input and a hash query string like in google. The input value and url have to be synced like:

index.html#?term=something

To do this we have to inject $location into our angular control. See the Angular Guide about $location. Then we have to observe both the $scope.term (which is bound to the input value) and $location.search().

For a while ago I needed to provide an alternative solution when Silverlight isn’t installed. I searched  for javascript code for this and found this:

• A blog post about that: Piotr Puszkiewicz’s Silverlight Blog. Determining if Silverlight is installed using Javascript.
• A more advanced javascript function which can even determine the version of the Silerlight can be pulled from Silverlight.js library.

I didn’t need to determine the version of Silverlight, so I wrote a simplified js function (but it works in all browsers):