SPEasyForms: Wizard Container User Guide

This is the end-user documentation for the new Wizard container built in to the AddOns v2014.01.15 package for SPEasyForms. I’ll follow up quickly with another post explaining the implementation details for developers.

The Wizard container is kind of a special case. Unlike Tabs or Accordion, I really only see the wizard container as useful if most, or ideally all, of the fields are on it. It allows you to paginate a form so users can step through it. Continue reading “SPEasyForms: Wizard Container User Guide”

SPEasyForms: Lookup Detail Adapter User Guide

This post will serve as the documentation for the new Lookup Detail Adapter for SPEasyForms. This adapter is available in AddOns v2014.01.14, and provides the following functionality:

  • You can tie a field to another lookup field in the list and another column in the lookup list.
  • When the lookup field’s value changes, the corresponding data from the other column in the lookup list is copied into the field with the adapter.
  • Currently, this adapter can be applied to fields of type SPFieldText, SPFieldNote, SPFieldMultiLine, SPFieldChoice, SPFieldMultiChoice, SPFieldDateTime, SPFieldBoolean, SPFieldURL, SPFieldUser,  SPFieldUserMulti, SPFieldNumber and SPFieldCurrency.

Note that since the data from the lookup list is duplicated in the current list, this adapter is only appropriate for situations where what you want is a snapshot of what the data was at the time when the form is filled out. The data is not updated when the data in the lookup list changes; it is only updated when the selected value of the lookup field in the list item changes.
Continue reading “SPEasyForms: Lookup Detail Adapter User Guide”

SPEasyForms: HTML Snippet Container User Guide

SPEasyForms is fast approaching a year old. Since it’s inception, the most frequently requested feature is the ability to insert some arbitrary HTML into the form. I understand the need; a large form looks better if you break it up into sections with headers. Plus you might want to just tweak the css of a single form a little or insert a tiny bit of JavaScript to change the look or behavior of some control. And I’ve always intended to add something to address this at some point.
The HTMLSnippetContainer is intended to address all of these needs, and potentially more. It is a container, but unlike the other containers in SPEasyForms, it doesn’t contain fields, it just contains a bit of HTML. This container is part of AddOns.2015.00.08, so the rest of this guide will assume that you already have that or a later version installed.

Continue reading “SPEasyForms: HTML Snippet Container User Guide”

Security in SPEasyForms

If you were at SharePoint Saturday VA Beach and you saw the session on SPEasyForms, you probably heard us say that the ribbon button for configuring SPEasyForms for a list is security trimmed and you need to have the Manage Lists permission in order to see it. But there is also a link to the settings page on the list settings page, and I recently realized that I never got around to security trimming this link.

So the question is, is this a security flaw? In a word, no. The reason is that despite its name, security trimming is not a security mechanism. It is a UI feature. Generally, it is a bad practice to show people a link to something that they cannot use. Having the link appear on the list settings page for users who cannot configure it is certainly a UI flaw, and one that I will start to address in the next AddOns release for SPEasyForms.

So the next question is, what are the security considerations you should be aware of when using SPEasyForms? SPEasyForms security is entirely based on file system security, meaning that what a user can do with SPEasyForms is based on the SharePoint permissions assigned to the files that SPEasyForms depends on.
Continue reading “Security in SPEasyForms”

Initializing Field Values through Request Parameters using SPEasyForms

Scott Shearer and I were at SharePoint Saturday VA Beach this past weekend, which was an excellent event. Scott did a few different presentations including one on SPEasyForms, which drew a pretty big crowd and was pretty well received. After the presentation Scott opened the floor for questions, which quickly got a little deeper into the implementation details than he was expecting so I got up and fielded some questions. One of the questions was if you pass in request parameters, can SPEasyForms initialize form fields from the values? The answer was no, but it wouldn’t be that hard to implement and this is a very common request in SharePoint forums. In fact, I’m going to need this kind of functionality for some of the improvements I envision for SPEasyForms in the future.
Continue reading “Initializing Field Values through Request Parameters using SPEasyForms”

Extending SPEasyForms Visibility Rules

This is going to be a fairly short post, because there isn’t that much to extending visibility rules. SPEasyForms visibility rules have two extension points, state handlers and comparison operators. The built-in state handlers and comparison operators in v2014.01 are shown in the two drop down lists on the add/edit visibility rule dialog box shown below:
image
This post is going to explain how to extend the visibility rules by adding the following functionality:
  • Comparison operators for >, >=, <, <=, and !=
  • State handlers to highlight a field in various colors

Continue reading “Extending SPEasyForms Visibility Rules”

First SPEasyForms Plug-in, DefaultToCurrentUserAdapter

To demonstrate writing a plug-in for SPEasyForms, I’m going to write a pretty simple adapter that can be applied to user fields and adds the functionality to default the field value to the currently logged on user on new forms.  It’s not just simple enough to provide a good sample for explaining creating plug-ins, it’s also something that customers ask me for pretty frequently. This post is going to explain the JavaScript behind the plug-in. The source code download will be a full-fledged no code sandbox solution, but if you need an explanation of the solution or packaging see my previous post Anatomy of a No Code Sandbox Solution; I’m not going to explain that again here. 
Continue reading “First SPEasyForms Plug-in, DefaultToCurrentUserAdapter”

Anatomy of a No Code Sandbox Solution

Let me just warn you up front, this is not going to be a very exciting post. Packaging is pretty boring. Nor is there anything original about it. I’m using a technique I first read about in articles by Ted Pattison back in about 2007. If I could still find those articles, this would be a very short post pointing you to them, but I did some rooting around looking for them and didn’t have a lot of luck, thus this post.
Continue reading “Anatomy of a No Code Sandbox Solution”

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