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CSR on Steroids and the Amazing Technicolor Text Boxes, or CSR by Type

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First things first, I want to apologize, because what I’m going to build in this post is pretty hideous. I’m going to introduce the concept of hooking up SharePoint CSR by type, rather than by internal field name (as most examples show). In this post, I’m going to show how to do CSR by Type, meaning override all fields of a given SPFieldType.

By way of background, yesterday I was trying to override the Client-side Rendering (CSR) of a Url field to allow it to take non-standard protocols like notes://. I didn’t feel like creating a site column so I applied it to the OOB site column called Url. So I setup my overrides like so:

Here I’m overriding the rendering for the field called Url in all forms and views, right? Not so fast sparky! This worked a little too well. My override was getting called for other fields of type SPFieldUrl on the page that weren’t named Url. Ugh! Stepping through clienttemplates.js in the debugger, it quickly became apparent what was going on. In the fields object, you can specify CSR by internal field name, like I’ve been doing in previous posts in this series, but you can also specify CSR by type of field (using the client-side field type, so for instance Text for SPFieldText). This replaces the default rendering for all fields of that type.

That’s actually pretty cool, but the problem with it is that if you have a field whose internal name is the same as a field type, there is no way for you to override just that field. Bad Microsoft, programmer no donut! The rest of this post is going to be a quick demo I put together to demonstrate this functionality. I haven’t seen anything in the documentation for CSR, or any examples, that explain this functionality. Of course, the documentation for CSR is pretty thin.

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Managing Role Assignments/Permissions with SharePoint REST Part2

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In my last post I described many of the REST endpoints available in SharePoint to manage role assignments. In this post, I will provide a concrete example of using these endpoints in a provisioning-like scenario. I say provision-like because real provisioning scenarios tend to be very specific and one-offs (i.e. I need 7 sites, each with 5 lists and 3 groups, based on a naming convention by organization, and these permissions, and blah and blah and blah). Such specific requirements can’t be written into a one size fits all solution, so I’m just going to mimic them by creating a whole bunch of role assignments, and then deal with some of the issues of initiating a bunch of ajax calls in a short period of time.

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Managing Role Assignments/Permissions with SharePoint REST

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To assign permissions in SharePoint, you make one or more role assignments, which requires three things:

  • Some kind of handle for a securable object. That’s basically a site, list, library, folder, document, or item.
  • The principal id for something to which roles can be assigned. That’s either an Active Directory user or security group, or a SharePoint group.
  • The id of a role definition. Like ‘Full Control’ or ‘Edit’ or ‘Contribute’. This is basically a named collection of granular permissions that are defined at the site collection root and can be assigned to a securable object in that site collection.

In this post, I’m going to explain the REST service calls required in order to make role assignments to SharePoint securable objects. I will show the calls using jQuery’s ajax (because I’m working through them in the console and the console won’t resolve promises). I’ll follow up with a post with some demo code pulling it all together and probably using fetch.

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A Fetch-based CORS Wrapper for SharePoint REST

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In this post, I’m going to create a better CORS Wrapper for SharePoint REST operations, and demonstrate using it for CRUD operations on a Picture library. First, I want to remove the dependency of jQuery, using fetch instead. As I covered in a previous post, Ugly SPA Revisited using Fetch and REST, fetch is new enough and implementations are spotty enough, even in evergreen browsers, that I will need to polyfill fetch and ES6 promise in order to support a reasonable cross-section of browsers.

By implementing the full range of CRUD operations on document libraries, we’ll have an opportunity to see if there are other issues that need to be addressed in our CORS Wrapper. My last post really only did one simple REST operation across CORS boundaries.

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An Accordion View, Custom List View Display Templates (CSR)

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Implementing CSR display templates as a custom list view is one of my favorite things about Client-side Rendering in SharePoint. The reasons are twofold:

  1. First, we take full control of the view. We’re not just rendering some little piece (i.e. one field) of a form about which we’re not supposed to know anything.
  2. Even better, the deployment for this is very simple, in fact, it can be done entirely through the OOB SharePoint user interface…sort of!

The devil’s in the details and every SharePoint developer-related topic seems to include a “sort of”, but still custom list view display templates in SharePoint are pretty cool.

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Tabbed Forms with Client-side Rendering (CSR)

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In this post, we’re going to look at how to implement tabbed forms using CSR. Unlike our previous examples of field rendering, which generally depend on only one field, tabbed forms are going to depend on all fields in the form. For this reason, it makes sense that we’re going to inject our JavaScript by setting the JSLink property of a content type. Content types are, after all, basically just a collection of fields. There are some gotchas’, or at least things you should be aware of when setting the JSLink on a content type, which I’ll cover as I get to them.

Giving credit where it’s due, the code for this rendering template is an adaption of a tabbed forms rendering template that is available in the Office Developer Center samples for Client-side Rendering. I’ve included a link to that article in the references below. Like most tutorials, deployment is left up to you in that article, and it’s assumed you’ll just add content editors to your forms to get the script loaded. I’ll include a utility for setting the JSLink property on a content type, which is a much better solution with some caveats.

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Determining the Permissions of the Current User with REST

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In this post I’m going to show how to determine the current user’s permissions using the SharePoint REST API. This is going to be a little different because I’m just going to run some commands in the JavaScript console, so this is mostly going to be a bunch of screenshots. But since you can’t very well copy and paste from my screenshots, I’ve also included all of the commands I’m going to run in a code block at the bottom of this post.

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CRUD Operations for SharePoint Docs Using Fetch and REST

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In my last post I talked about the REST service calls of what I said at the time was possibly the ugliest SPA of all time. I wanted to do it with no dependencies, which means interacting with XMLHttpRequest directly, and that isn’t anybody’s idea of pretty. No dependencies also means no promises, and once you’ve programmed with promises for a while, working without them on networking code feels like a step backwards. In this post I’m going to rewrite the ugly SPA with the following changes:

  • I’m going to use fetch for all REST calls. fetch is the future, or so they tell me. And it gives me a comfortable promises-based API.
  • I’m also going to use “odata=nometadata” for all of my REST calls. As I mentioned in my last post, this may not work in a SharePoint 2013 environment unless Service Pack 1 has been installed and changes have been made to the SharePoint web.config to support JSON light. So if you’re on 2013 and it doesn’t support JSON light, you need to use “odata=verbose” as shown in my previous post.

As I work through the code, I’ll point out differences between “odata=nometadata” and “odata=verbose”. There really aren’t that many differences.

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CRUD Operations for SharePoint Docs Using REST

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In this post, I’m going to show how to do basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations with documents and SharePoint RESTful web services. Along the way, I’m going to flesh out possibly the world’s ugliest SPA (single page application). I’m only going to talk about the parts of the code that deal with Ajax and the RESTful web services, but I’ll attach the complete source. It’s a wiki page, so you can just drop it in a document library and open it to see how it works (it does try to work with a picture library with a title of Pictures in the current site, if you don’t have one, you can either create one or change the listTitle variable to be the title of another picture library in your site).

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A Full-Fledged Client-side Rendering (CSR) Template, a Rating Field

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In this post I’m going to write a more full-fledged CSR implementation, in that I’ll do the rendering and override template behaviors to deal with that rendering. It will be a simple rating field that let’s the user rate an item with a value from one to ten. I’m also going to override most of what you might want to override when implementing a display template to modify a form field, as in the NewForm, EditForm, DisplayForm, View, and OnPreRender callbacks plus Validation. So far, all of the CSR display templates I’ve shown for modifying form fields have been fairly evil. At least from Microsoft’s point of view. The reason is that I haven’t actually rendered anything, I’ve let SharePoint do the rendering and then manipulated the DOM afterward. In general, Microsoft would say, if you didn’t render it, don’t touch it. I can see their point, but then again if SharePoint gets me 80% of my customers requirements and I have to hack it a bit to get the other 20%, I’m not too proud.

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