August 10, 2012

Chuvash localization of moment.js

For three months ago I added Chuvash localization of moment.js. For 16 days ago moment.js 1.7.0 was officially released which included the Chuvash translation.

Wait a sec… What is moment.js?

moment.js is the best datetime tool for javascript. It supports many languages (now even Chuvash) for displaying date and time. Another very handy functionality is showing relative time which has a simple interface: fromNow(). Here is a simple example from a web browser console:

July 6, 2012

Chuvash translation of Wikipedia Mobile

The official Wikipedia mobile app is now translated into Chuvash language and available to use:

What does Chuvash mean?

I am Chuvash. Chuvash is the name of an ethnicity which counts up to 2 milions peoply (mostly in Russia). Chuvashes talk the Chuvash language which is also an official language in Chuvash Republic (besides Russian). Chuvash language is a Turkic language and has a status “Vulnerable” in the UNESCO list of languages in danger. There is a Chuvash Wikipedia cv.wikipedia.org.

June 20, 2012

Multiple instances of javascript webparts on the same page

Javascript has become popular among many SharePoint developers thanks to easy and fast jQuery, CSOM, SPServices and many other javascript libraries. That can make solutions modern and fast. On the other hand developers should be aware of more things (some of them at Bamboo Team Blog). One of those is scoping of javascript webparts. The problem a developer has to consider: what happens if a user creates two or more instances of the same beautiful webpart on the page? Let’s go and lab :) I’ll create a solution for this lab: sp-lend-id.ikkelen. This time it will be a sandboxed solution. This solution contains a webpart:

June 20, 2012

Three ways to get the id of last created SPListItem

An interesting question came on SharePoint StackExchange: How to retrieve the guid of the last uploaded file. It is only possible in CSOM as far as I know. But if we simplify the task, how to get the id of the last item, the we can compare three ways of getting them: SPServices, jQuery + listdata.svc and CSOM.

SPServices

The most easiest way, but not available in async:

$().SPServices.SPGetLastItemId({	
	listName: "Documents"
});

listdata.svc

Just combine some query strings and try in the browsers address bar:

June 19, 2012

Web Application Properties as JSON

I saw an interesting question on sharepoint.stackexchange: How to access a Web application/Farm level property bag via jQuery/Javascript/ClientContext. Some time ago I tested a custom http handler, so I wanted to try a custom httphandler for this as well. It worked. Here more details: Just deploy sp-lend-id.tupsam from the solution. If you don’t have any properties in your web application, just add some:

asnp microsoft.sharepoint.powershell
$app = get-spwebapplication http://dev
$app.Properties.Add("Santa", "Claus")
$app.Properties.Add("Ded", "Moroz")
$app.Properties.Add("Hel", "Muci")
$app.Update()

Then just to test open the httphandler directly in the browser:

June 19, 2012

Using javascript objects passed from closed popup

It is not a rocket science to pass objects from child window (popup) to main window. The problem I encountered today was IE and passing complex objects. So it is just an IE issue as far as I know. The problem occurs when you pass some object (not a simple String or Number) to main window:

window.opener.takeAnObjectFromChild = { 
      title: "Should even be available when I close the child" 
};

and you then close the child window, next time the main window tries to access the passed object:

June 17, 2012

javascript: developing for performance

Many words have been said about the importance of performance when working with javascript files. Here I want to summarize what developers can do to increase the performance related to javascript. I found many tips on blogs. Here comes my aggregated list of actions one can do to speed up sharepoint (and not only) sites with focus on javascript:

1. Load only sharepoint stuff you need

Use prefetch option to only load sharepoint javascript files that needed. To see the difference, just add ?prefetch=0 to your sharepoint url in the browser. The downside of this lazy loading is that you wrap all sharepoint related javascript into ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded otherwise you maybe invoke some of javascript objects and functions that are not loaded. So the prize of this huge performance improvement is a high awareness by a developer when and which scripts are loaded and run.

June 13, 2012

nodeunit and SharePoint: unit tests in javascript

nodeunit is a (relatively) new test framework for javascript, mainly for node, but it can be run in a browser as well. The most popular framework for testing javascript is Qunit, but I’ll lab with it another time. I found nodeunit tests in moment.js - the best date handling framework for javascript and it worked very well. So first of all, why should we test? The best answer is actually: Life is to short for manual testing (it was actually the slogan at the Google London Test Automation Conference 2007.

June 6, 2012

Develop for SharePoint on Windows 8

Do you like Windows 8 user expirience, as me? Well than you want to try developing sharepoint solutions in Windows 8. Here I will show what I found out.

Environment

I installed Windows 8 Release Preview as a VMWare machine. Then I installed Visual Studio 2012 RC. Then I followed the steps for installing SharePoint on Windows 8 which are more or less the same as for Windows 7 client install. But then I encountered an error I haven’t found solution for yet. In my standalone sharepoint installation there were some permission problems:

June 1, 2012

$ in cmssitemanager.js conflicts with $ in jQuery

In SharePoint 2010 if CMSSiteManager.js library is loaded besides jQuery, then much of stuff stops working. The reason is that the dollar sign ($) is used in cmssitemanager.js as well which conflicts with jQuery. Mostly it appears on pages where you load jQuery and have an image library with thumbnails. To avoid this, just replace all $ with jQuery in your custom scripts. A more crazy situation is when avoiding $ isn’t enough. It is when you load jQuery to page head automatically on all pages. The Asset picker (AssetPortalBrowser.aspx) invokes $ itself and gets with jQuery in conflict without you write a single line of custom javascript code. You usually get the following error: