So far we did not test any of SPElements web-parts on sharePoint 2010. I just wonder, did anyone tried any product? which one?
SharePoint 2010
May 6th, 2010SharePoint field format validation (regular expression)
September 13th, 2009If you want to use regular expression to validate SharePoint field format, there are few solutions you can choose from (such as:Â Regular Expression Validator, Regular Expression Validator Field and few commercial solutions). The existing solutions are based on custom field type, which works very good as long as you don’t use Office application to update metadata and don’t need to integrate any 3rd party tool with the list (or write your own). If you want to use any 3rd party tools you might be in trouble since the they might not work with the custom field type.
Another approach is to use a constraint on an existing field (a new feature in SPListConstraints): regular expression validation. When loading a new item, or changing item metadata, the metadata is validated with the regular expression the user (administrator) selected.
Here’s how the setting of the field format validation looks like in the SPListConstraints (version 1.0b1 and above):
Lightbox for SharePoint
August 30th, 2009Few weeks ago a user posted a comment on the forum stating that a Lightbox webpart for SharePoint didn’t work with SPSlideShow. After some checking, it looked like there’s no go solution since Lightbox is based on a JavaScript which is incompatible with the one used in SPSlideShow. Our solution: a new, free, Lightbox clone (milkbox) based web part: SPElements Picture Gallery.
SPElements Picture Gallery works with Picture Library and displays clickable thumbnails gallery from the pictures in the library, which can either: (a) create lightbox-like popup, (b) open the image in the browser or (c) open the image item. All configurable by the SharePoint webpart administrator.
Advanced data validation
June 22nd, 2009SharePoint out of the box data validation for fields usually restricts the range of values allowed. Frequent request is to compare between fields in the list, e.g. field A < field B. This is a good idea when field A is start date and field B is end date, in such a case we would expect StartDate <= EndDate. So far the way to implement such a constraint was by writing custom code. But no more.
SPListConstraint just got a new feature “Data Validation Contraint” which do just that – enforce relation between the values of two columns. The feature allows more than a single constraint set on a list so there’s not problem adding few rules (A <= B, B > C, etc..). The new feature is configured using the SPListConstraint settings page:
Free Mini & Color Calendar Web Parts for SharePoint
April 25th, 2009Last few days we were developing 2 new web parts, both are calendar related, and use similar infrastructure:
- SPElements Mini Calendar Web Part – a mini calendar web part that allows adding a calendar in any existing page without taking all the space like SharePoint’s built-in calendar.
- SPElements Color Calendar Web Part – It’s based on SharePoint’s built-in calendar but adds colors.
Both web parts support coloring & multiple calendar sources. You can select several different calendar lists to show in a single web part and give a different color for each source list (or use multiple views from the same calendar list and color each view differently). Since the mini calendar is very small only one color is selected for each date in the case there are few events with different coloring in the same day.
SPElements Mini Calendar is a small, resizable web part. When pointing on a specific date all the events in that date are displayed in a tooltip box. Clicking on an event in the opened box will open the view form of the item. Smallest recommended size is 180px*180px, although it’s possible to resize to even smaller size but scroll bars might appear on some browsers (Firefox).
SPElements Color Calendar integrates nicely into SharePoint calendar look and feel with a gradient filling of the events as shown in the image to the right.
Viewing SharePoint internals remotely
April 15th, 2009From time to time I need to find information about SharePoint server internals for the various product developments. There’s one very popular product called SharePoint Manager 2007 which is very good but requires to be run from the SharePoint server. I was looking for a simple tool, without server installation, that will get the information. I found few tools:Â without running on the server. I found few (free) tools such as SharePoint Explorer Client 2.0 add-in for IE (but I use Firefox).
After looking a bit I’ve decided to try and write something quickly, and so came SPElements Remote Explorer for SharePoint – a simple tree navigation tool thats uses SharePoint standard web services to browse SharePoint internals. As a side effect, it can also browse SharePoint Live since there’s no server side installation.
The privileges needed from the user are minimal (read access & remote interfaces access) with anyone with standard role as contributor or above got them (you can even add it to the ‘Read’ role). You can open the tree directly in a specific site so there’s no need to have the permission for the entire farm, just for a specific site.
RSS Ticker for SharePoint
February 15th, 2009A customer needed a news web part for SharePoint 2007, however no good web part was found. Since most news web sites are using RSS feeds, we decided to write an RSS ticker web part: SPRssTicker. Since SharePoint lists got RSS feeds the ticker can also display those feeds too.
Printing SharePoint Calendars & Lists
January 21st, 2009Most of the ideas to build WebPart come from client requests. Few days ago a client asked how can he print his SharePoint calendar?
Well, there are some full size calendar web parts for SharePoint, which include printing, however that wasn’t the request. He just wanted to print his current calendar.
Making long story short – no existing solution was found, thus came SPPrint, a printing feature for SharePoint, to print SharePoint calendars. As a side effect it can also print any given list (an idea taken from Ishai’s printing feature)
Update: Please leave comments in the community forum. There are too many comments to follow properly here.
Hello World
January 17th, 2009We’ve just released the first version of SPChart (Flash chart WebPart for SharePoint).
If you’ve got comments/missing features leave a comment here…