Saturday, March 30, 2013

SharePoint forms styling

In my previous entry I demonstrated how to customize SharePoint forms with Forms Designer tool. Now I would like to show how to customize the views of forms by CSS-styles in the Forms Designer.

I changed my SharePoint web site theme into one of the standard named 'Grapello'. Now my HelpDesk has the following view:

SharePoint theme

Now I want to change the view of my forms customized with Forms Designer. Since these forms use JQuery UI library I went to http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ to find an appropriate theme. 'Eggplant' fits a lot to my SharePoint theme. You can also define your own theme with easy-to-use ThemeRoller interface:

JQuery Ui Theme Roller

In the Download Builder dialog box I selected all items in 'UI Core' group and 'Button' and 'Tabs' items in 'Widgets' group. All other items were unchecked. After downloading was completed I copied all content from file css/[theme]/jquery-ui-[version].custom.min.css in the downloaded archive and pasted it into Forms Designer CSS-editor:

SharePoint Forms Designer JavaScript editor

Now request form acquired the following view:

SharePoint designed form

I found two problems:

  1. The 'Select' elements in the field Date and Time became very small.
  2. The borders of controls were not changed.

To fix the first issue I removed selector .ui-widget select from CSS. For the second, I added the following CSS-code:

.fd_control input[type="text"],  
.fd_control textarea,  
.fd_control select, 
#fd_form .ms-dtinput input[type="text"],  
#fd_form .ms-dttimeinput input[type="text"], 
#fd_form .ms-inputuserfield, 
#fd_form .ms-rtefield,  
#fd_form .ms-rtefield2,  
#fd_form .ms-longfileinput,  
#fd_form .ms-fileinput 
{ 
    border: 1px solid #903CD6; 
}

The result is here:

SharePoint styled form

Summing up, I want to say that it is very easy to define your own style for Forms Designer view with JQuery UI Theme Roller utility. Alternatively you can choose one of the existing themes. But it is important to check your form after applying a new theme because there may occur some visual problems that will have to be fixed with quick modifications of CSS.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Dmitry,
    Great post, i have a question related more to table design. In the first screen shot you placed the 'details' field next to other 3 fields on the left. How can this be accomplished?
    Thanks,
    Katerina

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Katerina,
      I put a table into the cell of another one. Next, I put these three fields into the child table.

      Delete
  2. When I download the zip file from jqueryUI I get several options to choose from.can you tell me which style sheet I should grab?

    options
    - jquery-ui.min.css
    - jquery-ui.structure.min.css
    - jquery-ui.theme.min.css

    ReplyDelete

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