Buta no Ie

A quick tip…

Because the sp.ui.dialog.js library is lazy-loaded, it may not be available when the page is ready/loaded. I’ve seen some early examples where if you wanted to do something on page load, you use:

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("YourInitFunction()");

This will not work if you want to open a SharePoint dialog on page load. Instead use:

ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(YourInitFunction, "sp.ui.dialog.js");

Microsoft has announced they’re busy working away on the next version of Internet Explorer. Some of the more interesting things included:

• Much better JavaScript performance! IE8 was a nice first step at improving JS performance on IE but still woefully behind the JS profilers and JIT compilers of Firefox, Safari, et al. Early builds of IE9 are already 4 times faster in the SunSpider benchmark than that of IE8 and putting it about par with Firefox 3.5.
• CSS Level 3! Again early builds apparently are able to pass the majority of the CSS3 Selectors Testsuite, 41 out of 43. Of course, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 already completely pass this test. IE8 only passed 22 of these tests by the way.

Where’s more HTML5?

Microsoft was very non-committal about this. They made a good start in IE8 with things like DOM storage, cross document messaging (XDM) and have a built in JSON API, but where’s <video> or more importantly <canvas>?

It’s a promising start for Microsoft with news about IE9’s JS performance and CSS3 compliance. Here’s hoping to Microsoft finding time to implement some of the HTML elements that competitors have already integrated into their browsers. Don’t need IE10 to STILL be playing catch-up.

Excuse the really bad screen cap to the right… the Status Bar and Notifications are two UI elements in SharePoint 2010 which allow us to give the user information in context without distracting them. The Status Bar and Notifications are both exposed as client-side JavaScript APIs.

Status Bar

The Status Bar lives below the Ribbon and displays persistent information such as page status or web site alerts. It already existed in SharePoint 2007 as an UI element but it’s functionality was not exposed as an API. It will display an HTML message, which can include links and/or images, on 1 of 4 pre-set background colours depending on the importance of the status defined.

There is a Server API to set statuses at page render time as well as a JavaScript API to dynamically add/remove messages.

The JavaScript API is in the SP.UI.Status namespace and is as follows:

SP.UI.Status.addStatus(strTitle, strHtml, atBeginning)
SP.UI.Status.updateStatus(sid, strHtml)
SP.UI.Status.removeStatus(sid)
SP.UI.Status.removeAllStatus(hide)
SP.UI.Status.setStatusPriColor(sid, strColor)

Notifications

Notifications are brand new to SharePoint 2010 and they are used for transient or semi-transient messages such as action confirmations. Notifications appear on the right side of the page below the ribbon and default to a 5 second display period. Like the Status Bar, the message format is HTML with the ability of including links and/or images.

There is a JavaScript API to add/remove messages. You also have the option to make a Notification “sticky” which means it will continue to display until you manually remove it through the API.

Notifications are in the SP.UI.Notify namespace:

SP.UI.Notify.addNotification(strTitle, bSticky, tooltip, onclickHandler)
SP.UI.Notify.removeNotification(id)