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!
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!
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]-->
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.
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 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)
SharePoint 2010 Ribbon
A busy first day at the SharePoint Conference so I’ll start off with a quickie.
As most of you know already, SharePoint 2010 will use the ribbon interface for editing. I personally like the ribbon from an UI perspective compared with the old editing UI for SharePoint 2007. Some might argue that it’s a bit cluttered and the context sensitive editing may be confusing to new users. I think it’s something that users can grasp in short fashion especially if they use Office 2007 or 2010 as well.
Something that’s new to me in 2010 are the AJAX form dialogs. Pretty much any new item creation is now done in a modal dialog now instead of taking the user to a different form page in 2007. This is great as it keeps everything in context for the user.
An added benefit of the ribbon and form dialogs is that in most cases we no longer have to design for or make design decisions regarding these edit mode elements anymore. They are pretty much separate from the rest of the page from a design perspective.
UPDATE:
I’ll be putting up another post regarding the dialog creation API which is exposed as a JavaScript library in a later post.
The ribbon is extensible as well, you’re able to create new button elements, replace existing elements with customized functionality or remove an element all together.