After hibernating for the winter, I have a spring treat for you all.
I present to you: Tips & Tricks: SharePoint 2013 Modal Dialogs. It’s a follow-up to my original SharePoint 2010 dialog tips & tricks post!
A few years back, I had a not so pleasant meal at the Burger Bar in Mandalay Bay. As luck would have it, a second SharePoint Conference and some colleagues already eating brought me back to the Burger Bar again.
I have to confess that I was quite pleased with the burger I had this time around.
Built my own burger:
The burger in all its glory!
Wow, the burger was at the right temperature and so soft, juicy and delicious! The sauce was served on the side and I’m glad it was, as it wasn’t needed. It turned out to be a great dip for my onion rings though!
Check out the chuck! Nice and juicy!
The only fault was the onion bun could not soak up all the lovely juices and was falling apart at the end.
Check out Burger Bar’s menu!
On my way back home from the SharePoint Conference, my Audi suddenly couldn’t shift out of first gear when in automatic. Thank goodness I could still get out of first gear using the “manual” shift mode. And as I’m limping home, I then get a ESP Fault error. Great, I don’t have automatic drive and now my traction control and ABS are gone too!
As this was a Friday, I had the weekend to troubleshoot and test things before it got into the shop… automatic works for all other shifts except first to second. What’s weirder, after some time manually shifting, going back into automatic will work, even the shift from first to second! But once I shut off the car, I have to do the same manual shift song and dance again.
So, as it turns out, what caused my car to not shift and have no ABS and traction control? A faulty $12 brake light switch! Nuts!
Wow, another week to-the-day and it’ll have been two years since I posted anything here!
Have learnt much and doing very cool things at Collabware and our CLM product for the past year and I’ve finally gotten off my butt and wrote a post with some tips & tricks on SharePoint 2010 Modal Dialogs on our blog:
http://blog.collabware.com/2012/10/30/tips-tricks-sharepoint-2010-modal-dialogs/
Of note is the ability to resize a modal dialog. I hadn’t found a completely working example so I’ve posted a version of the code we use for Collabware CLM. It leverages the same code that’s in SP.UI.Dialog.js when it initially sizes the dialog on page load. No dependencies on jQuery or other external frameworks!
I ran into an issue recently on a SharePoint 2010 project where a page containing a Thumbnails list view was throwing a JavaScript error. I actually took the wrong path troubleshooting this and burned through a lot of time as a result. I had incorrectly assumed the error had something to do with our custom master page.
Turns out the CMSSiteManager.js library that is used by the Thumbnails list view is also using the $ variable! Argh!
Good thing the plug-in pattern we use only calls $ internally and not globally…
(function($) {
// plug-in goodness here...
})(jQuery);
Unfortunately our scripts for invoking the plug-ins was referencing $… 
$(document).ready(function(){
$('.foo').samplePlugin();
});
A quick replacement of $ to jQuery did the trick:
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
jQuery('.foo').samplePlugin();
});
If you have large blocks of inline jQuery code on your page, you’ll probably want to use jQuery.noConflict():
jQuery.noConflict()(function() {
// code using $ as alias to jQuery
});
I recenty ran into some issues with exposing custom styles in the SharePoint 2010 Rich Text Editor (RTE) in browsers other than IE, or specifically with Firefox and Safari.
In order to have a custom style show up in either the Markup Styles and Styles drop downs in the Ribbon, you need to prefix your HTML class with either ms-rteElement- (shows up in Markup Styles) or ms-rteStyle- (shows up in Styles). You also need to use the -ms-name property within your rule.
For example:
H2.ms-rteElement-H2Lg {
-ms-name: "Large Heading 2";
font-size: 26px;
}
The problem I ran into was that the custom styles showed up the dropdowns for IE but not in any other browser. At first I though it was because the -ms-name property is a custom CSS extension in the MS name space. I tried adding properties like -moz-name and -webkit-name and even name but they had no effect.
Turns out the RTE custom styles don’t show up if they appear inside an @media block in your CSS file!
I ended up creating a bunch of stubs with just name -ms-name property BEFORE the @media block. If you try to place the stubs after the @media block, the RTE does not pick-up the label for the custom styles, they show up as empty options without labels in the RTE drop downs.
/* create stubs with -ms-name property here */
h2.ms-rteElement-H2Lg {
-ms-name: "Large Heading 2";
}
ul.ms-rteStyle-LinksList {
-ms-name:"Links List";
}
/* place actual properties inside @media block */
@media screen {
h2.ms-rteElement-H2Lg {
font-size: 26px;
}
ul.ms-rteStyle-LinksList {
list-style: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
}
You can read more about how to create custom styles for the SharePoint 2010 RTE here:
UPDATE!!!
The latest versions of the CKSDev for SharePoint 2010 include an SPI for stubbing out a contextual web part! I highly recommend that anyone coding for SP2010 to install the CKS Dev Tools!
I haven’t had much opportunity to work with SharePoint 2010 in the past few months. However, I did get to try out the MSDN walkthrough for creating a custom web part with contextual ribbon tab recently. You can find the article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407578.aspx
In a nutshell, what’s supposed to happen is when you click on the web part, there will be a custom tab that appears in the Ribbon. It all works great for the first instance of the custom web part you place onto a page, but if you try adding a second instance of the web part, your page blows up!
You’ll get the following error:
Item has already been added. Key in dictionary: ‘Ribbon.CustomContextualTabGroup’ Key being added: ‘Ribbon.CustomContextualTabGroup’
:-/ … looks like there wasn’t much QA done for the walkthrough. Anyways, to make a short story shorter… I posted a question on the TechNet forums and Dallas Tester from MS did get back to me with a bunch of suggestions.
Here are the changes you can make to allow for multiple instances of the custom web part to appear on the page without everything blowing up.
Make the following modifications to the ContextualTabWebPart class.
Add the global ‘_added’ bool and OnInit event handler:
static bool _added = false;
protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnInit(e);
_added = false;
}
Since we no longer have to get the unique component ID in the delay script, I changed DelayScript into a private string:
private string delayScript = @"
function _addCustomPageComponent()
{
for (var i = 0; i < g_customWebPartIds.length; i++)
{
SP.Ribbon.PageManager.get_instance().addPageComponent(new ContextualTabWebPart.CustomPageComponent(g_customWebPartIds[i]));
}
}
function _registerCustomPageComponent()
{
SP.SOD.registerSod(""CustomContextualTabPageComponent.js"", ""/_layouts/CustomContextualTabPageComponent.js"");
var isDefined = ""undefined"";
try
{
isDefined = typeof(ContextualTabWebPart.CustomPageComponent);
}
catch(e)
{
}
EnsureScript(""CustomContextualTabPageComponent.js"",isDefined, _addCustomPageComponent);
}
SP.SOD.executeOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(_registerCustomPageComponent, ""sp.ribbon.js"");";
Modify the OnPreRender event handler:
protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnPreRender(e);
ClientScriptManager csm = this.Page.ClientScript;
string componentId = SPRibbon.GetWebPartPageComponentId(this); // the unique component id
// if this is the first instance of the custom web part,
//we need to add the contextual tab to the ribbon
if (!_added)
{
this.AddContextualTab();
_added = true;
}
// we need to create an array which will store the IDs of all instances of our custom web part
csm.RegisterClientScriptBlock(
this.GetType(), "DeclareCustomWebPartArray", "var g_customWebPartIds = new Array();", true);
// add this webpart's ID to our array
csm.RegisterClientScriptBlock(
this.GetType(), "AddCustomWebPartId" + componentId, "g_customWebPartIds.push('" + componentId + "');", true);
csm.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this.GetType(), "ContextualTabWebPart", this.delayScript, true);
}
If you want to verify that the correct web part is trigger the Ribbon commands, you can modify the ‘handleCommand‘ method in ‘CustomContextualTabPageComponent.js‘
handleCommand: function ContextualTabWebPart_CustomPageComponent$handleCommand(commandId, properties, sequence) {
if (commandId === 'CustomContextualTab.HelloWorldCommand') {
alert(this._webPartPageComponentId + ' says: Hello, world!');
}
if (commandId === 'CustomContextualTab.GoodbyeWorldCommand') {
alert(this._webPartPageComponentId + ' says: Good-bye, world!');
}
}
Here’s a ZIP file of the entire solution in case you’re too lazy to make the modifications yourself. 
In a previous post detailing the new SharePoint 2010 CssRegistration control, I mentioned that I did not know what the ConditionalExpression property did. Well, now I do!
This property takes an Internet Explorer Conditional Comment. For example, if we wanted to link to a style sheet specific to IE 7 or greater, we can do this:
<SharePoint:CSSRegistration Name="foo.css" ConditionalExpression="gte IE 7" runat="server" />
The following markup would be emitted:
<!--[if gte IE 7]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="foo.css"/> <![endif]-->