Andrew Bartucciotto

Designing good SharePoint Case Management GUI

abartucciotto — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:56:00 GMT

I have been working on a SharePoint Case Management Portal Project for some time now and we've just finished iteration 3 now. When the site was first designed and built, the custom SharePoint menu looked cool. Each item had its own icon and each icon meant something as it was not really overwhelming on the eye. We've added in a whole bunch of new icons and now the menu looks terrible.

I've been browsing the web researching GUI design principles when I came across a site called IxDA (Interaction Design Association). It’s not your typical "look at this design" site but a forum for discussion regarding Design Patterns, Tools, Research and Methods regarding Web, Desktop, Mobile and any other type of Interface design. I highly recommend a read if you want to stimulate your brain into gear with some good quality discussion.

So what am I going to do about my menu. Well so far I have built up mental model of all the items that make up the menu. I have given the idea of a tree menu some thought but I find the idea of an expanding/contracting tree menu a bit cumbersome. Whilst this would certainly help with the issue of keeping the menu height small (when tree items are contracted) the thought of having to implement this in SharePoint and the Value it will add really don't seem too attractive to me.

In terms of what we currently have, the items are grouped into two sections - All items of type "View" e.g. view details, view notes etc were in one group and all actions items in a separate group. In all the there are 22 items which makes for a lengthy menu. Potentially too long if we want to ensure that majority of items are visible in a 1024 resolution. I like the idea of limiting the amount of clicks the user would have to do to get to a page. This means that splitting the site up into a 2 level hierarchy would not really do the job. By this mean having top level menu items that would link you through to sub-sites for a given action with the rest of the menu options provided on the sub-site. Hmmm decision decisions.

Well I’ll mess around about in Photoshop I think to see how it could look. But in the mean time check out IxDA

Settting a Master Page for a WSS SharePoint site

abartucciotto — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:58:00 GMT

Just a had a colleague ask me how to set the Master Page for a WSS site. I had to cast my mind back to a project I worked on a while ago in which two techniques were used to set the Master Page. One way was editing the "Modify All Site Settings" page, accessed through the Site Actions button, which involved a modified user interface to allow an administrator to actually pick a master page from the gallery as you would in a standard Moss publishing site. This technique is actually packaged as a web part at CodePlex.

The other technique involved using features to deploy a master page to the master page gallery and then using another feature to set it as the sites master page by using code within the FeatureActivated SPFeatureReceiverProperties.

The below code from the FeatureActivated method also sets a logo and theme that I had created. This can be ommitted if you don't need to set this. As always I create an additional folder within the Images folder in the 12 hive just incase any service pack updates that are applied to a SharePoint installation overwrites my files.

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
SPWeb newWeb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent;

newWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

            //Apply web theme
            newWeb.ApplyTheme("none");
            newWeb.ApplyTheme("Your Theme");

            //Apply Logo
            newWeb.SiteLogoUrl = "/_layouts/images/YourFolder/YourLogo.gif";
            newWeb.SiteLogoDescription = "Logo Description";

            //Check if MasterPage exists in Master Page Gallery
            foreach (SPListItem listItem in newWeb.Site.RootWeb.Lists["Master Page Gallery"].Items)
            {
                if (listItem["Name"].ToString().Equals("YourMasterPage.Master", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                {
                    //Found Master Page So apply it to the current web
                    string masterUrl = new Uri(newWeb.Site.Url).GetComponents(UriComponents.Path, UriFormat.Unescaped);
                    if (!masterUrl.StartsWith("/")) masterUrl = "/" + masterUrl;
                    if (!masterUrl.EndsWith("/")) masterUrl += "/";
                    masterUrl += "_catalogs/masterpage/YourMasterPage.master";
                    newWeb.MasterUrl = masterUrl;
                    newWeb.CustomMasterUrl = masterUrl;
                }
            }

AKS Accessibility Kit for SharePoint installed and working

abartucciotto — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:51:00 GMT

Today I had a bit of spare time to attempt an installation of the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint. The kit can be download from Codeplex or the AKS site itself. The file size is around 17MB

One of the things I discovered after installing AKS file is that it really is only built for public facing MOSS sites at the moment. What you get when you install the kit is basically a feature that sits within your Features folder on the file system. It’s the one called AKS. Using the STSADM tool you can install and activate the feature for a given site collection. This will deploy a bunch of AKS master pages and CSS file onto you site. Navigate to the site collection where you activated the feature and browse to site settings and the master page and page layouts gallery. You will find the new master pages titled AKS_BlueBand.master and several others. The CSS is deployed to the style library. A good source of information for exactly what happens can be found at CMS Wire.

I hope to crack open the master pages for a good look and run the pages through an online checker such as ATRC. We are currently building some Accessible SharePoint sites for some Government agencies however we built it using our own master pages so it will be interesting to see how this one stacks up. So far the AKS master pages I have applied look pretty good. There is an issue with the site actions menu playing up a bit in terms of styling widths on mouse hover.

Hopefully have some more on this fairly soon. So far so good with the AKS install

Annual Exmouth Fishing Trip

abartucciotto — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:30:00 GMT

Last week was my annual fishing trip to Exmouth. Exmouth is a remote town around 13 hours drive north of Perth. A couple friends and myself, Eric Salotti and Marco De Laurentiis cruised up for the week to fish off Marco's boat. The fishing as usual provided plenty of highlights but it wasn't up to its usual explosiveness. I managed to snare myself some personal best fish however in the shape of Spanish Mackerel, Rankin Cod and Coral Trout. The currents were a bit funny and there was a bit of weed around which caused problems when we were trolling. We got to see some massive whales jumping around which was absolutely awesome. Can't wait to get back up there next year.

More SpellChecker quirks - Select default language or check in spanish anyone?

abartucciotto — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:39:00 GMT

At the moment I'm just looking into an extremely interesting bug within the sharepoint spell checker. One of my colleagues, Fred Schwass, informed me that when you type in certain words the default language drop down appears asking you to select a language (Australian in our case) even though we have explicitly set to default to Australian anyway.

Normal functionality performs as follows. Enter your text, submit your form or check your text, spell checker highlights suggested words

Buggy functionality perfroms as follows: Enter your text, submit your form or check your text, spell checker requires you to select default language, spell checker highlights suggest words

It's funny because you type in "Innacurate" or "Orange tree" and it produces the bug however typing in "orange" or "tree" will not produce the bug. There are also certain words that trigger the spellchecker to check the words in spanish.

Advanced Search Bug in SharePoint

abartucciotto — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:27:00 GMT

Recently I was doing some work for a client around setting up an advanced search page and some scopes. The client has several web applications set up and the Shared Service Provider (SSP) is indexing all the web applications. There are several scopes we set up specificly grabbing content from one of the web applications on the SSP. These scopes are set up to grab data that have specific content types.

The problem arose when we tried to set the default scope on the advanced search page. By default the scope for advanced search is All Sites. However when you set the scope to be a custom scope and ensure that no other scopes are active when you return to the advanced search page and search for an item it will return results from every single web application. This is very strange behavior and one which I am curious to hear if anyone has experienced anything like this.

The only way to return items from the custom scope is to modify the advanced search web part and specifically enable scopes on the web part. You then have to select the scope by ticking the check box and click search. I would have thought that by setting a default scope through Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings > Search Scopes on the advanced search section that this would cover it. Maybe there is something I have overlooked. Of course one solution would be to set up seperate SSP's for the web applications but geez I would like to know why it won't work.

Perth SharePoint User Group Monthly Meeting

abartucciotto — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:21:00 GMT

The monthly Perth SharePoint User Group meeting is on next tuesday at 12:30 pm. This provides sharepoint developers and prospective sharepoint customers with a great opportunity to link up with some of the great resources we have around Perth plus you get free Pizza. How cool is that? For all the details see the information provided kindly by Rick Rosato below.

http://www.connectedsystems.com/news/Event%20Library/Perth_SharePoint_User_Group_Meeting_April_2008.aspx

Event Information
Event: Topic:	Perth SharePoint User Group Various SharePoint Solutions (with Ajax controls)
Date and Time:	Tuesday, 15th April 2008 12:30 pm (GMT +08:00, Perth) (3^rd Tuesday of every month)
Where:	Microsoft Perth – Presentation Room Level 14, QV1 Building (http://www.qv1perth.com/qv1/location.htm) 250 St George’s Terrace, Perth
Parking Option:	1. QV.1 Car Park is via Murray Street – Wilson (http://www.wilsonparking.com.au/html/content-easylocator.cfm - select WA & Perth CBD on right side) 2. Cloisters Car Park - via St Georges Terrace or Hay Street 3. His Majesty’s Car Park is via Murray Street – City of Perth (http://www.mapimage.net/city_of_perth/) 4. Elder Street Car Park – City of Perth (http://www.mapimage.net/city_of_perth/)
RSVP:	Rick Rosato – rick@connectedsystems.com CoB Monday 14^th April 2008
Presenter:	Rick Rosato – Connected Systems (rick@connectedsystems.com)
Duration:	1 hour
Description:	This session will be led by Rick Rosato, Consultant at Connected Systems. Rick will demonstrate various solutions created in Sharepoint where many of the web part are using Ajax controls.
Level:	200 (100 – High level business overview – mostly slides, 200 – Business/Somewhat Technical – some slides and some demos, 300 – Quite technical – few slides, mostly demo and some coding, 400 – Extremely technical - mostly coding, few slides)
Upcoming Topics
Under Consideration:	1. Talk fest – bring your curly questions. 2. What does it take to pass the SharePoint Exams? *We are looking for volunteer speakers to present on a topic of their choice.*
Additional Notes
Notes:	Please selectively forward this invite to those who might be interested in attending the Perth SharePoint User Group meetings. We don’t want SPAMmers!! Also, the time has changed to 12:30pm – pizza provided.

MOSS Advanced Search throwing "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

abartucciotto — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:32:00 GMT

I've been playing with the advanced search for a client and wanted to do something fairly straight forward. All I wanted to do is disable the language picker and result type picker. The language picker is the one allows you to search only the language(s) such as French, German etc. Both these features were not required by the client but they did need the custom scopes I had set up to be visible to allow further filtering. So what's the problem I hear you ask? Well after modifying the Advanced Search Web Part to disable the features and enable the scopes it kept on throwing the error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

Initially I though this could be caused by not specifying a label for the scopes but it was still throwing the error even after supplying labels. After much enabling and disabling of scopes, languages and results it did eventually display the way I wanted but it was sporadic at best. My solution of trying combinations until worked is not really a solution and how do you document this for a client?

"Um Just fiddle with with a bit until it works and then don't ever touch it".

After searching around for a resolution I hit the wall. A few posts suggest that Service Pack 1 for SharePoint is the cause of the problem. If anyone knows anything about this please let me know.

Spell Check Web Service in Share Point - Excluding SharePoint Controls

abartucciotto — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:14:00 GMT

Todays task seemed simple enough, get the spell check web service running on a custom control embedded in a share point page. Where to start? Looking for documentation on the web I could not find anything remotely helpful until I stumbled upon a blog by Hoo Kai Sheng. This helped get the ball rolling. It out lines the easiest way to get the spell checker working, that is using the SpellCheckEntirePage javascript function.

As the name suggests this spell checks all the text fields on page. It skips drop down lists and multiple select boxes but any other form control with a text input seems fair game. This means Share Point controls such as the people picker (SharePoint:PeopleEditor) will get checked as well. This is not very user friendly as we do not want the checker asking people to fix their domain names and user names.

The trick to exclude SP controls is to search the page the SP is on and find the text input box that resides within it. In this case the SharePoint:PeopleEditor contains several hidden fields, we don't need to worry about these, and also an input field which is called "downlevelTextBox". This is the one we want to exclude. Because we are using custom ascx controls, in the code behind, we can use the FindControl method on our SharePoint:PeopleEditor. In the example below textboxEscalationManager is the people picker ID.

TextBox textboxEscalationManager = (TextBox)PeopleEditorEscalationManager.FindControl("downlevelTextBox");
textboxEscalationManager.Attributes.Add("excludeFromSpellCheck", "true");

When the page renders the control it now has the attribute - excludeFromSpellCheck and will not be checked by the Spell Checker.

It has been a long time coming

abartucciotto — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:55:00 GMT

I know it has a been a long time coming, but i figured I better get the ball rolling on this sucker as Brian Madsen has been kind enough to provide me with some blog space. Who should read my blog? To answer that question it may be worth just going into just what exactly do i do.

Well... I'm a consultant at Change Corporation in Perth, Western Australia and I specialise in designing and building UI's for Web Sites and MOSS portals. I find myself more an more frequently diving into the deep end in MOSS 2007 building everthing from custom web parts and features to Active Directory Write-Back timer jobs. I guess that's one of the benefits of having a bit of coding experience.

Projects I have worked on include fully customised MOSS interfaces built from the ground up utilising AJAX that Brian Madsen has somehow managed to get working in IE quirks mode, Silverlight custom webparts, TreeView webparts iterating through folder based lists etc. It's pretty cool, and challenging, customising MOSS and thankfully there are heaps and heaps of great blogs out there to read such as Andrew Connell and Heather Solomon. Hopefully this blog can be one of them where I can dump all my findings here and save you guys/gals a bit of time.