Today I found out how to start workflows in JSOM (JavaScript Object Model in SharePoint). Nothing special, but since it is not documented, it took me a while to find a solution. Here is the code which I want to keep as simple as possible. What you need to start a SP2010 Workflow for a list item or a document in JSOM, you need to load SP.WorkflowServices.js and you need to create the manager and get the service, then you can trigger a workflow using the workflow name, the list guid and the guid of the list item: [code language=“javascript”] var ctx = SP.

There are many correct ways (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…) of making scripts work with the Minimal Download Strategy Feature (MDS) in SharePoint 2013 and 2016. But to be honest - every time I need it, I get confused. So now it is time to find a simple solution for that. Who is better at it than the developers of the SharePoint themselves? Look at the MDS code in the built-in Display Templates: Let’s keep it as simple as Item_Default.

Everybody loves User Custom Actions in SharePoint. That’s the only recommended way of customizing SharePoint. You have heard about it. Unfortunately there is no convinient way of administering them. People have their console applications or powershell scripts to add, update and delete user custom actions. It works but it is hard to open up Visual Studio or PowerShell every time you will try out an idea on a test site.

The blog post below describes the technical details about how Web Parts can be exported using a hidden tool in OOB SharePoint, though this requires manual assembling of a special url. If you are just interested in a solution for an easy Web Part Export function, just proceed directly to my new blog post where you can download my tool that you can add to your web browser. Web Part Exporter

Today my colleague Johannes Milling wrote an awesome post: Export SharePoint List Data To XML Directly from the GUI He uses the old and forgotten RPC-based web service owssvr.dll (that has existed since SharePoint 2003). This url pattern is used to get the xml-formatted list data for a specific ListView: [source] http://<site_url>/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List=&View=&Query=*&XMLDATA=TRUE [/source] To automate this I have written a PowerShell function. All the details are in the comments: [source language=“PowerShell”] function Export-OIPSPListDataAsXml { <# .

[caption id=“attachment_3437” align=“alignnone” width=“480”] All the “small” app parts, web parts, delegate controls, user controls, and other “packages” that “must” be delivered to the users on every page load of the Start Page of your Intranet.[/caption] Recently we made an investment to improve the performance of our intranet. We made many changes in different layers: SQL, Network, Browser upgrade and code. Here I want to tell about what code changes we did to improve the web browser performance.

In our project we have a requirement to show birthdays and job anniversaries in the Newsfeed. The solution is simple (when you know it) but there has not been any information about it online, until today. I want to share a few lines of PowerShell code to enable Anniversary notifications in the Newsfeed. This desired piece of code was written by my colleague Emma Degerman. Enjoy: [source language=“PowerShell”] $job = Get-SPTimerJob | ?

Recently an issue was reported about count mismatches in SharePoint 2013 Communities. The number of replies in category tiles sometimes is different compared to the community stats in the web part called “What’s happening”. The actual number of replies is 1 in the figure below. The user who has reported has tried to add, update and delete discussions and replies. I have invested some time debugging this issue. It would be pity to not share my findings.

I am reading Mobile HTML5 written by Estelle Weyle. It is an awesome recap and new knowledge about html, css and javascript. I want to highlight one of tips I got: Use the weakest CSS selectors (can be found on page 204). We all know, that inline CSS and !important are evil. They have a higher level of specifity and override the standard cascade of the CSS rules. If you use !

Do you prefer REST over CSOM as I do? I’ll skip the whys. Andrew Connell put it already in wrtiting so nicely. Well, if you do prefer REST, then you must have discovered some shortcomings of REST, or its incompleteness compared to CSOM. I think of: Inability to filter items based on multivalued taxonomy fields Inability to filter items based on user fields where user is added through a group, rather than directly, e.

This is an open question about the domains for SharePoint apps. On Technet: Configure an environment for apps for SharePoint (SharePoint 2013) we can read the following: You must configure a new name in Domain Name Services (DNS) to host the apps. To help improve security, the domain name should not be a subdomain of the domain that hosts the SharePoint sites. For example, if the SharePoint sites are at Contoso.

I have installed SharePoint SP1 on my development machine. Yammer and OneDrive links have appeared in the Central Administration: If you go ahead and click “Configure Yammer”, you can activate it: Because: Yammer is Microsoft’s recommended tool for social collaboration. When you activate Yammer, you’ll get this dialog, and the Yammer link in the SuiteBar: What happens when you click on Yammer, is that you are redirected to Yammer.com and you are prompted a login page.

My colleagues and friends keep asking me what sessions I went to and what I would recommend to see on channel9 where all of them are publicly available. Here is my prioritized list of sessions: #spc325 Real-world examples of FTC to CAM transformations. This was the most exciting developer session. Vesa Juvonen takes the Cloud App Model to its maximum. Wanna know more about the future. See this session. #spc404 Build your own REST service with WebAPI 2.

Unfortunately in SharePoint 2013 the custom error pages are not applied: link 1, link 2. Hopefully there will be a hotfix that solves it. Comments from Wordpress.com ryan - Mar 5, 2014 I agree, I have seen a few about. Thanks for the post Jon - Mar 2, 2014 I have seen a few blog posts about this, it is a common dislike about 2013. Nice post.

In my current project we are migrating a custom sharepoint solution from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. One of the improvements is that we migrate custom field choices to Managed Metadata. Choice Fields were not intended to be so many. So now it is time to convert them to metadata terms. I have written a PowerShell script which copies all the choices from a field to a termset. The script uses Client Side Object Model (CSOM) to get the choice values and it uses Server Object Model to write data to the termset.

In my project I deploy some apps directly through the ObjectModel directly with PowerShell. The apps are built with TFS I have a script that installs or updates apps if there is a new version of the app. Previously I used Import-SPAppPackage to compare the version and productid with an existing app instance, but often I get this error: The provided App differs from another App with the same version and product ID.

Today I got a question: How many lines of code are there in our SharePoint solution? After a little search, I found that PowerShell is really a nice tool to count lines of code: How do you count lines of code (stackoverflow)? I wanted to count lines for different types of code: Code Behind written in C#, the files have .cs file extension JavaScript code (except jQuery, angular or knockout frameworks) PowerShell files (.

I have had a strange bug. The comment text box in a OOB SharePoint 2013 blog doesn’t appear. It only says: “There are no comments for this post.” In this blog post I’ll tell you how I found the bug and I’ll show you how you can temporarily bring the commenting to life. I have had luck. While it doesn’t work on the Test Environment, it does actually work on my development machine.

The more javascript code is produced in SharePoint solutions, the more need we have to log information and possible errors to a central logging place in SharePoint: ULS. This blog post is about logging to ULS from javascript. For a while ago I read a blog post: 5 suggestions to implement a better logging in SharePoint The author @avishnyakov mentions the ability log to ULS from javascript. I want to dive deeper.

Last Saturday I attended Leetspeak. Among many awesome speeches and presentations I discovered scriptcs. scriptcs lets you write C# code directly in the console, or execute scripts written with just your favourite editor. Please see more about it on the site. What I thought during Justin Rusbatch’s session at Leetspeak: Can we use scriptcs in SharePoint? Technically there is no limitations in SharePoint for scriptcs. Any .NET code can be registered, imported and invoked in a console or in a standalone script.

As a SharePoint architect or a SharePoint developer, you must have been thinking about the benefits/limitations of SharePoint apps a lot. I want to point out one of them today, which is very important: using custom webservices deployed to SharePoint inside apps. That is impossible and it is designed to be so due to the security architecture in the sharepoint app framework. I have read much about SharePoint apps (books, whitepapers, blog posts) and stumbled over these two contradictive statements:

Recently I needed to add an Alert Me link on Pages. Alert Me is a well known SharePoint functionality for notifying users about changes in list or list items. It is availabe in OOB SharePoint as a command in Ribbon if you go to a list view: When you click on this ribbon command, SharePoint opens a modal dialog and takes you to layouts page: SubNew.aspx. To open a modal dialog and load a page is not a rocket science.

Recently I needed to create valid urls for pages using javascript. Also this time I thought it must be some out-of-the-box code for that in SharePoint. The first thing I came up was the “Add page” dialog. I found that the actual dialog was in the _layouts virtual folder: /\_layouts/15/CreatePublishingPageDialog.aspx ```Bingo, it does the validation in the client side. This is the responsible javascript function that resides directly in the page: \[sourcecode language="javascript"\] function UpdateUrl() { LoadTermContextInfo(); var hiddenPageUrlLabelExtensionClientId = "<%=hiddenPageUrlLabelExtension.

How many instances of jquery are there in your SharePoint farm? [sourcecode language=“powershell”] Get-SPWebApplication http://dev ` | Select -Expand Sites ` | Select -Expand AllWebs ` | Select -Expand Lists ` | Select -Expand Items ` | ? { $_.Url -match “jquery.*.js” } ` | select Name, Url [/sourcecode] Have you more than two (jquery and jquery-ui), then you have too much. You can save much place and performance by using Content Delivery Network (CDN) links for the resources like javascript, css, fonts and icons.

Have you noticed that you can right-click a web application project in Visual Studio and convert it to a provider hosted app? Well why not? Basically your own website and a SharePoint manifest is all what you need for a provider hosted app. This discovery today made me think about all legacy web apps out there that can be converted to SharePoint apps. Traditionally we had to add plain links to external applications or embed them into an IFrame by hardcoding it in an .

Recently I had an exciting mail conversation with Thomas Deutsch. He came up with an idea how to fasten the development of apps. This smart approach is called “Provider Hosted First”. See Thomas’ original blog post. Here are some highlights: What you actually do is a local website which runs in grunt server: localhost:9000 ```Then a SharePoint-hosted app is created with an SPAppIframe that refers to that local app site.

I have a newer blog post about MDS, that provides a much simpler solution. Please check it before reading further. Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) is an important feature in SharePoint 2013. It lets you download only a page delta, only changes. There is still issues with the MDS and custom scripts and almost no documentation on msdn or technet. In this blog post I want to learn more about adjusting custom scripts for MDS.

I have a newer blog post about MDS, that provides a much simpler solution. Please check it before reading further. This is a part 1 of the blog post about Minimal Download Strategy and javascript adjustments for user code. What I initially thought should be enough for one post, is not enough, so I see it as a part 1. I wrote this post after I had read Chris O’Brien’s post about JSLink Here I want investigate how we can get his accordion list view working with MDS.

Today I want to share little css tip for styling the suiteBar in SharePoint 2013 and making it work even in IE8. I needed to apply a green color to the suiteBar (#005128). It worked in all browsers except IE8: The reason why is a special css rule (in corev15.css) that only IE8 understands: [sourcecode language=“css”] .ms-core-needIEFilter #suiteBarLeft { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(GradientType=0,startColorstr=#ff0072c6,endColorstr=#ff0072c6); } [/sourcecode] I found this answer in an blog post written by Trace Armstrong: SharePoint 2013 – Branding the Top Bar and the Importance of Browser Testing.

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.

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.

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: More RAM Using Display Names 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.

By now TypeScript shouldn’t be something one has to introduce. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. If you haven’t already done it, go and see the intro video for TypeScript, check out a tutorial and visit the typescript playground. There are other javascript libraries which extend javascript and are compatible/compile to javascript: Dart and CoffeeScript. To be honest I had never time to try those.

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.