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:

May 13, 2012

javascript toolkit on text file

Referencing javascript libraries from Content Delivery Networks (CDN) like jQuery can have many benefits. The self-hosted javascript files are on the other hand give you more control. But in one situation it is much better with cdns: the development. Like Marc D Anderson pointed:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this txt file has become a standard part of my toolkit already. I’ve added it to three client environments just since last week. It’s the A #1 fastest way to get something up and running, even if you know you’re going to host the files locally later.

May 11, 2012

jQuery mobile and SharePoint

In this post I want to explore how to build a mobile app using jQuery mobile. Recently I discovered two great blog posts about this:

Building SharePoint web apps using Sencha Touch by Luc Stakenborg
jQuery mobile and SharePoint by Chris Quick

In my post I’ll use their findings and share some of mine thougts. I’ll focus mostly on how to get started with jQuery mobile and SharePoint. So go ahead and create your jQuery mobile app, just drag’n’drop some controls: Download it and yout get an “app.html” file and “my.css”. For now ignore my.css. app.html is something like that:

May 11, 2012

Install android sdk and eclipse in Ubuntu 12.04

Download and unpack the Android SDK, move it to your home folder. I prefer to set a point in front of the directory folder to make it be hidden so that my home directoy still looks tidy: .android-sdk-linux. Then add this to your path:

export PATH=${PATH}:~/.android-sdk-linux/tools:~/.android-sdk-linux/platform-tools

.android-sdk-tools is for running android command, and .android-sdk-tools/platform-tools is for running adb command And add it to your .bashrc-file so that this path is loaded automatically when you log on.

April 21, 2012

Android: Asynchronously download images

In the Malmöfestivalen for Android where I participate we wanted to show thumbnails of events in lists. We have urls of thumbnails from Malmofestivalen API. This information is stored in a sqlite database and a SimpleCursorAdapter is used for getting the events from the database. It is possible to bind the urls to ImageView objects (by downloading the stream: 1, 2, 3). The problem is in a listactivity with many images it will freeze. So it must be an AsyncTask, and it should be some kind of local cache to avoid loading same images over and over again. Fortunately there is already ImageDownloader class provided in the android blog post: Multithreading For Performance . The next step is to create custom adapter and extend from SimpleCursorAdapter: EventCursorAdapter, like described on Android-er and and SP-Technolab: [sourcecode language=“java”]public class EventCursorAdapter extends SimpleCursorAdapter { private final ImageDownloader imageDownloader = new ImageDownloader(); public EventCursorAdapter(Context context, int layout, Cursor c, String[] from, int[] to) { super(context, layout, c, from, to); imageDownloader.setMode(ImageDownloader.Mode.NO_DOWNLOADED_DRAWABLE); } @Override public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View row = super.getView(position, convertView, parent); Cursor cursor = getCursor(); cursor.moveToPosition(position); ImageView iv = (ImageView) row.findViewById(R.id.eventitemrowimage); String url = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(EventProvider.EVENT_KEY_URISMALLIIMAGE)); if (url.length() > 0) { imageDownloader.download(url, iv); } String start = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(EventProvider.EVENT_KEY_STARTDATE)); String end = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(EventProvider.EVENT_KEY_ENDDATE)); String dateString = DateHelper.createShortDateResume(start, end); TextView tv = (TextView) row.findViewById(R.id.eventitemrowtimeresume); tv.setText(dateString); return row; } }[/sourcecode] In this code the view is created by the super class and then it is modified, the alternative is to “inflate the view” completely self. The result is an event list which opens directly and loads thumbnails asynchronously: listactivity with images

April 21, 2012

Implement public wcf service in SharePoint

If you have an external web service reference in your sharepoint solution, you can use web.config configuration like:

<system.serviceModel>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
<bindings>
        <wsHttpBinding>
            <binding name="WSHttpBinding\_ISuperService" >
                <security mode="None">
                    <message clientCredentialType="None" />
                </security>
            </binding>
        </wsHttpBinding>
    </bindings>
    <client>
        <endpoint address="http://super.domain/SuperService.svc"
            binding="wsHttpBinding"
            bindingConfiguration="WSHttpBinding\_ISuperService" 
            contract="ISuperService"
            name="SuperServiceEndpoint">
        </endpoint>
    </client>
</system.serviceModel>
```security mode is set to "None". Then in code just get this configuration:

var proxy = new SuperServiceClient(“SuperServiceEndpoint”); var result = proxy.GetSomething();

var binding = new WSHttpBinding(); binding.Security.Mode = SecurityMode.None; var endpoint = new EndpointAddress(“http://super.domain/SuperService.svc"); var proxy = new ExternalServices.DreamServiceClient(binding, endpoint); var result = proxy.GetSomething();