SharePoint Fun

Hiding columns in SharePoint is nothing new really, there have been several articles written on this topic. The approach for doing this, however, does inspire some debate in terms of what the best practice is. Let’s say we can agree that there are three ways to get this done:

1. Using the built in content types to specify which columns you wish to be hidden.
2. Using jQuery and a content editor web part to hide the columns as desired.
3. Hide the columns programmatically using code.

I just wanted to make some comments on all three. The content type approach is a good one and relatively simple to implement. Once you’ve enabled content types for your list or library, click on the default content type, let’s say it’s Item, and choose the column you’d like to have hidden and simply set it’s column settings to Hidden. Here is an excellent reference for this technique: http://littletalk.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/hide-remove-title-column-from-sharepoint-list/.

Ok so the above works good, but what happens if you only want to introduce these hidden columns on your New and Edit forms but not your Disp form as an example. Or what if your scenario requires that they are hidden from all default New, Edit and Disp forms, but you have some custom SharePoint Designer disp forms that you’ve created that those fields need to be visible on. The content type approach will hide the column for all forms and so that won’t always work. We need something more granular.

So there is where the jQuery approach comes in handy. Some great resources for this:

• Paul Galvin has written some great articles on this topic over at EndUserSharePoint – http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/06/17/quick-and-easy-use-jquery-to-hide-a-text-field-on-a-sharepoint-form/ and http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/06/18/quick-and-easy-a-better-way-to-use-jquery-to-hide-a-text-field-on-a-sharepoint-form/

As per the comments by Nathan Ahlstrom in the second link noted above, the final fix for me was to use:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('nobr:contains("Completion time")').closest('tr').hide();
    $('nobr:contains("Score")').closest('tr').hide();
});
</script>

Please note that I had to add quotes around the tr tag for this to work for me.

The final approach uses some custom code and the object model to hide columns for a given list. http://www.sharepointkings.com/2008/05/how-to-hide-column-of-sharepoint-list.html. Now I’m not entirely sure how this works with custom forms besides the New, Edit and Disp forms, and until I have time to try out, I won’t know the answer to that. It’s worth mentioning because it does give you some granularity in that you can specify hidden properties per form.

That’s all for now. Please send in your comments if you have them, would love to hear from you.

Ok, so we all know that ASP.NET controls, or any control for that matter with the runat=”server” tag, will generate a funky client ID when rendered on the page.

Sometimes, we need to get at those controls via some client side javascript so that we may manipulate their properties or simply get/set their values.

If you’re not already familiar with JQuery, you need to take 5 minutes of your day and read up on it. It’s a very light javascript library that any decent developer should have in their toolbelt.

http://jquery.com/

Now getting started with JQuery is pretty simple. It doesn’t matter what type of app you’re building, you simply need to download the jquery-1.3.2.min.js (this is the current version as of the time i wrote this post) file and include it in the HEAD tag your page:

1

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>

Some examples of what you can do with JQeury (I got most of this from reading the documentation):

Example 1 – DOM Ready

1
2
3
4

$(document).ready(function () {
    // execute any code here that you'd like to be run as soon as the dom is ready. You may often
    // want to show/hide certain controls on page load
});

Example 2 – Determine if an ASP.NET radio button is checked

1
2
3

var radio = $("#<%= radioButton.ClientID %>");
var domRadio = radio[0];
var isChecked = domRadio.checked;

1

<input type="radio" id="radioButton" name="age" value="20" runat="server" />

This is the most important part:

1

$("#<%= radioButton.ClientID %>")

radioButton.ClientID gets replaced with the automatically generated ASP.NET client id of this control. When I was working with prototypejs, I used to use the class selector to get a handle to these controls: $(“.className”) so naturally I started doing the same thing when I began working with JQuery. I wasn’t entirely happy with this method because it added what was otherwise an unnecessary property to my controls.

After discovering .ClientID, I use it most often. I still use the class selector but for different reasons. For example, if i want to show/hide a specific TR tag within a table, here is how I would do that:

Example 3 – Show/Hide

1
2
3
4
5

if (isChecked) {
    $(".rowHide").hide();
} else {
    $(".rowHide").show();
}

1
2
3

<tr class="rowHide">
    <td>some data</td>
</tr>

Example 4 – Set the url for a link tag

1
2
3

$("#<%= link.ClientID %>").attr({
    href: "/pages/mypage.aspx?id=" + id;
});

<a id="link" target="_blank" runat="server">My Link</a>

I’ll be writing a post that describes in detail how to leverage JQuery to build autocomplete functionality into your SharePoint applications. Some users prefer the ASP.NET Ajax route, but in my humble opinion, JQuery is far easier to configure and use.

If anyone would like to see that sooner, just ping me and I’ll send some notes of how I achieved this.