Kendo Editor in SharePoint forms

In SharePoint Forms Designer 3.1.2 we added some interesting features.

First, now Kendo-widgets detect your culture and use right format and language for date and time controls. So, it has become more comfortable to use kendo date and time pickers in forms:

The second feature is a new template for Multiline Plain Text fields - Kendo Editor:

In a form, it appears like this:

You can customize toolbar via JavaScript. Here is the complete list of available tools:

"bold",
"italic",
"underline",
"strikethrough",
"justifyLeft",
"justifyCenter",
"justifyRight",
"justifyFull",
"insertUnorderedList",
"insertOrderedList",
"indent",
"outdent",
"createLink",
"unlink",
"insertImage",
"insertFile",
"subscript",
"superscript",
"createTable",
"addRowAbove",
"addRowBelow",
"addColumnLeft",
"addColumnRight",
"deleteRow",
"deleteColumn",
"viewHtml",
"formatting",
"cleanFormatting",
"fontName",
"fontSize",
"foreColor",
"backColor",
"print"

You can get the current list of tools via JavaScript:

fd.field('Text').control('kendoEditor').done(function(editor) {
    console.log(editor.options.tools);
});

And set a new list:

fd.field('Text').control('kendoEditor').done(function(editor) {
 editor.setOptions({tools: ["bold",
                "italic",
                "underline",
                "strikethrough",
                "justifyLeft",
                "justifyCenter",
                "justifyRight",
                "justifyFull",
                "insertUnorderedList",
                "insertOrderedList",
                "indent",
                "outdent",
                "createLink",
                "unlink",
                "insertImage",
                "insertFile",
                "subscript",
                "superscript",
                "createTable",
                "addRowAbove",
                "addRowBelow",
                "addColumnLeft",
                "addColumnRight",
                "deleteRow",
                "deleteColumn",
                "viewHtml",
                "formatting",
                "cleanFormatting",
                "fontName",
                "fontSize",
                "foreColor",
                "backColor",
                "print"
 ]});
});

Here is the editor with full toolbox:

Feel free to ask your questions

More properties for fields and Kendo Date and Time pickers for dates

In SharePoint Forms Designer 3.1.1 we added a lot of new useful features and here is a short manual of using them.

First, we added changing color, size, and style of font in field`s title and control. Everything is displaying in the field properties.

Second feature is maybe the most significant - now you can define own templates for fields. Just pick ‘Custom’ option in the ‘Template’ property. Next, set custom markup for the control using ‘HTML’ property and custom logic for it with ‘JavaScript’.

Another feature we added is pre-defined templates. Currently, they’re available for Date and DateTime fields only. You can change default rendering with Kendo Date and Time picker that looks much better and works faster than the default control.

Upgrade the solution and enjoy!

Cross-site Lookup to a SharePoint list with more than 5000 items

Today, I wanted to demonstrate how to adjust Plumsail Cross-site Lookup fields for a list with more than 5000 items. As you might know, SharePoint has a constraint on a view that does not allow you to filter or sort a view containing more than 5000 items. This constraint prevents users from searching items in Cross-site Lookup drop-down. Now I will show you how to work around this restriction.

First, you need to create indices for all columns of the source list by which you're going to filter items in the Cross-site Lookup drop-down. By default, the only field that requires an index is the field that you've picked in the 'Field' drop-down of the Plumsail Lookup Manager.

Go to the source list's settings and click 'Indexed columns' under the list of columns. Create an index for each column that requires it.

Next, open the Lookup Manager and expand Advanced settings section. In the 'Request items' snippet, you have to remove 'orderby' clause from the first request because SharePoint does not allow you to sort a view containing more than 5000 items even by an indexed column. The result snippet will be:

function (term, page) {
  if (!term || term.length == 0) {
    return "{WebUrl}/_api/web/lists('{ListId}')/items?$select=Id,{LookupField}&$top=10";
  }
  return "{WebUrl}/_api/web/lists('{ListId}')/items?$select=Id,{LookupField}&$orderby={LookupField}&$filter=startswith({LookupField}, '" + encodeURIComponent(term) + "')&$top=10";
}

And here you go:

Please, note that if your filtering criteria is not concrete, say, you typed just a single letter, the result may contain more than 5000 items and you will get an error in the drop-down. Just continue typing to decrease the number of filtered items and you will get the result.

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Creating related items on a new item form via a non-grid related items control

In November we released a feature that allows you to create new items and link them to the current item on a new item form. Up until now, however, you could only do that with the related items control in grid mode. Starting from Forms Designer 3.0.8 you are able to do it with a non-grid mode related items control as well.

Let’s illustrate what we’re talking about. Here’s a form:

Let’s add a new related contact:

It appears in the related items control:

Then we can save the parent item, when we do so a link is created:

Implementation

Open the parent New form in Forms Designer.

Set the related items control to 'Show new items only':

Add the following line of code to the JS-editor:

fd.populateFieldsInGrid($('.related-items'), {
 RelatedIssue: '{CurrentItem}'
});

Where RelatedIssue is the internal name of a lookup field on the child list to the parent list and related-items is a CSS class name that you need to assign to the related items control in Forms Designer.

Save.

Open child New form in Forms Designer.

Add an HTML control to the form, set CDATA to false, insert the following code to it:

<div id="_fd_parent_temp">
<asp:HiddenField runat="server" ID="_fd_parent_tempField"
__designer:bind="{ddwrt:DataBind('i','_fd_parent_tempField','Value','Load','ID',ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),'@_fd_parent_temp')}" />
</div>

Add the following code to the JS editor:

$('#_fd_parent_temp > input').val(window.top.fd._tempParentId());

Save the child form.

Explanation

When we added a related items control and saved the form, Forms Designer added a hidden field called '_fd_parent_temp' to the target list. We then added a hidden '_fd_parent_tempField' control to the child form and bound it to the hidden field. When the child form loads, the JavaScript sets a temporary id of the parent item into _fd_parent_tempField. Finally, when the parent item is saved, Forms Designer checks '_fd_parent_temp' for the parent items’ id and sets the 'RelatedIssue' field to the parent item.

Feel free to ask your questions

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Printing SharePoint forms and exporting to PDF

In this blog post I will describe two new features that Forms Designer has received in the 3.0.7 release. You now have the ability to save your forms to PDF files (without help of a virtual printer) and print them in a printer-friendly way.

You can add the print and export buttons via General Settings in Forms Designer:

This will give you two additional buttons in the ribbon:

Printing

Suppose you have a form like this one:

As you can see, the form utilizes an accordion control that hides part of the form.

Now, when I click 'Print', the following document is produced:

As you can see, the document contains just the form without all the extra bits present on the webpage, plus the accordion is expanded, so all of the information is shown in the document.

Note, you can arbitrarily hide UI elements in print mode if you add 'fd-no-print' CSS class to them.

Saving to PDF

You now also have the ability to save PDF versions of your forms via Export to PDF button. Here’s what happens if we use it with our form:

The resulting PDF document contains the form as it is shown on the webpage.

Doing the above programmatically

You don’t have to add the ribbon buttons to use this functionality. You can use the following functions instead:

• fd.saveAsPDF('invoice.pdf') – this will save the form as a PDF with the name 'invoice.pdf'
• fd.printForm() – this will print the form

You can use these functions with your own Print/Export buttons or in some other way.

Providing different forms for different users in SharePoint Online

If you want to create different forms to different types of users in Forms Designer for SharePoint Online, you have two options: use permission settings or use SharePoint groups. We’ll look at both options in this article.

Suppose we have two types of users on our SharePoint website: managers and regular users. Managers have elevated privileges and we want to give them a particular set of functionality in a form. And regular users should receive a smaller or a different set of functionality and we want to give them a default form.

What we will do first is create an additional form set for managers using the plus button in the top right corner of Forms Designer.

Using permission settings

SharePoint has inbuilt permissions that we will utilize to distinguish managers from non-managers. Please check this list to see the available permissions:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ms412690.

We will pick CreateGroups to differentiate managers from non-managers, as only managers are allowed to create groups on our website.

We then will add an html control onto the default form in Forms Designer and paste the following html code inside it:

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="CreateGroups" EmitDiv="true">
<script type="text/javascript">
    fd.openForm('fd_Item_52b1ac46-b55e-4d3c-9807-dec2a57b2e9f_EditForm.aspx');
</script>
</Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

We have used CreateGroups permission string and the name of the form where we want our managers to be redirected to. The name of the form can be seen if you go to the appropriate form set in Forms Designer (in our case it’s Manager) and pick the appropriate form (in our case it’s Edit Form). That is the form that managers will be redirected onto:

Now whenever a manager opens the default edit form he or she will be redirected to his manager-only form, while a non-manager will stay on the default form.

Using SharePoint groups

Another choice we have to set up user group specific forms is by utilizing SharePoint groups.

For this we’ll need to add a JavaScript script to document library. Create a file named redirect.htm and add the following code to it:

<script type="text/javascript">
ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(function () {
 fd.openForm('fd_Item_ee433778-833d-4154-a72f-f68dc876fdc5_EditForm.aspx');
}, 'plumsail.fd.core.js');
</script>

Again, you’ll need to replace the filename as before.

Upload redirect.htm to a document library on your website. Take note of its URL.

Now to go the list with your form sets. Click to edit one of the three forms, we’ll be editing the Edit Form.

You’ll be redirected to the default edit form in edit mode, click “Add a Web Part” and add a Content Editor webpart:

Click the Content Editor Webpart’s little arrow button and click Edit.

Enter the URL of redirect.htm into the box:

Expand Advanced and enter the SharePoint group members of which you want to be redirected to the additional edit form, in our case it’d be the site collection owners that will be redirected to the Manager edit form:

Click OK.

Now all members of the group will be redirected to the Manager edit form, while non-members will stay on the default form.

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Using a Cross-site Lookup to a SharePoint list with an exceeded threshold limit

In SharePoint there is a default limit of 5000 items that you can add to a list until you are unable to filter that list. For more information on this see here.

What this means in practice is that you are unable to use a SharePoint Cross-site Lookup field that points to a list with an exceeded threshold. In this article we will describe a way of how you can go around the problem.

Note that in SharePoint On-Premises you can increase the threshold limit, for that you can check this article (it’s for SharePoint 2010, but 2013 is the same).

If you cannot or don’t want to change the limit, follow this procedure:

1. Index the columns that your use to filter the list items by. Here you should include any fields you’re using in the filter=… part of the query (go to Manage Plumsail Lookups → Request items to see code that returns the two queries)
2. Remove the orderby parameter from the first query (note the lack of the orderby parameter in the following example)

function (term, page) {
    if (!term || term.length == 0) {
        return "{WebUrl}/_api/web/lists('{ListId}')/items?$select=Id,{LookupField}&$top=10";
    }
    return "{WebUrl}/_api/web/lists('{ListId}')/items?$select=Id,{LookupField}&$orderby={LookupField}&$filter=startswith({LookupField}, '" + encodeURIComponent(term) + "')&$top=10";
}

Using ink sketch control in a SharePoint form to place markings on an image from Tablets, iPad, or PC

You can use the sketch control of SharePoint Forms Designer to put markings on an image (note, it won’t add markings to the actual image file but rather it will visually place your markings on top of it).

For example, you may wish to allow your users to draw the directions to somewhere on a map:

Or an insurance company may wish to specify damaged parts of a vehicle on its photographs:

To set this up you need to be familiar with the ink sketch control, if you are not please read the article.

Once you have you ink sketch control set up, you will need to:

1. Add a text field to the list, call it PictureURL, place it on the form. This field will contain a URL to the background picture for the ink sketch. Note, you can upload the picture to a document library on you SharePoint site and then just paste the link into this field.
2. Add the following JavaScript to the form:

   var url = fd.field('PictureURL').value();
   $('.sketch').css('background-image', 'url("' + url + '")');
   

3. Add CSS Class ‘sketch’ to the ink sketch control.
4. Set the ink sketch’s height and width attributes to those of the image and save.

Now the user will need to enter some URL that points to an image file into the PictureURL field, save, reload the form and he will get the ink sketch with the image as the background.

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