7+1 live demos: widgets, REST, jQuery in SharePoint lists

This article is part of the “HTML calculated column” series. You’ll find “teasers” in this post, in the form of links to live demos, but no tutorial or code.

Countdowns – A second method

I have already published a method to display countdowns in SharePoint lists, and generally speaking compare a date to today’s date. My method uses the DVWP and Javascript.

Alexander Bautz, a reader from Norway, has come up with slightly different approach. He has mixed two of my posts, the countdown and the “HTML calculated column“, to create a script that achieves the same result. A significant advantage of his approach is that you don’t need SharePoint Designer.

Live demo: holiday calendar

I got a couple questions about the holiday calendar displayed on my demo site, so here is the recipe.

The ingredients are already on this blog:
- how to shrink the calendar month view
- how to display HTML in a calendar view
- how to include a hover effect

So as usual add a CEWP to the page, under the calendar, where you’ll paste the CSS to shrink the calendar and the script to render the HTML.

Here is the formula I used for my demo:

="<DIV style='position: relative;margin:-4px;' onMouseOver='document.getElementById("""&Title&""").style.display=""""' onMouseOut='document.getElementById("""&Title&""").style.display=""none""'><DIV style='height:10px;overflow-y:hidden;' ><IMG style='width:20px;' src='"&Picture&"' /></DIV><DIV id='"&Title&"' style='display:none;position: absolute; top:-60px; left:-110px;background-color:navajowhite;border-width:thick;border-style:ridge;'><IMG style='width:86px;' src='"&Picture&"' />
"&Title&"</DIV></DIV>"

Where [Picture] is a column of type text containing the link to the displayed picture.

Note that the hover effect works well in Internet Explorer, but there are rendering issues in Firefox.

What’s this blog really about?

I found this intriguing post on Sue Hanley’s blog, and decided to give it a shot.

I went to this page, and fed it with the whole content of my blog (yes, 3 months already!). As a result, I got the above picture – looks like a fish with a big “SharePoint” tatoo on its flank.

So, what does this tell me about my blog?

SharePoint calendars: color coding, hover effects, etc.

Update [5/15/2009]: some readers have reported issues in specific cases (e.g. intraday events in calendar lists). To fix this, I have modified the post and now use “SPAN” tags instead of “DIV” tags. I’ll publish a more complete update in a couple weeks.

Update [6/8/2009]: A new version of the script is now available, more details here.

Two months ago, I introduced a method to display html in list views. The purpose of this post is to extend it to calendar views.

Issues with calendars

I had planned to publish this week a script for calendar views. But during my tests, I uncovered a couple issues… not with my script, but with SharePoint itself.

So I have decided to share my findings. I am looking forward to your feedback, to confirm the issues or share other issues you have found with calendars.

Note: I’ll update this ongoing list as and when more issues are identified.

Live demos

By popular demand, I have set up a public SharePoint site to showcase my customizations. This should be especially useful for dynamic behaviors, which are not easy to describe in a blog.

I am using a free service offered by fpweb.net.

The site currently features:
- the expand/collapse buttons
- a simple drop-down menu
- the tiny calendar
- a hover effect on the calendar

See them in action here:
http://8002.freesharepoint2007.com/default.aspx

In the future, I plan to add a download section, and give contributor access to some parts of the site. Let me know if you have other suggestions!

Version history for Web Part pages

This is a quite common trap among SharePoint users. You set up a document library for Web Part pages and activate versioning. Later on, you try to restore an older version, and realize that it doesn’t work. Why is that? Well, Web Parts that you dump in the Web Part zones of your page are actually stored in a different table internally, and don’t support versioning.

Surprisingly, it seems that versioning works for Web Parts that are NOT in Web Part zones. This is something I just learnt from Eray Chou on the SharePoint Designer Team blog.

If you are interested in page versioning, I recommend that you check out Eray Chou’s article. As for me, I need to try this Web-Part-outside-a-Web-Part-zone thing…