I was lucky to be a part of Sri Lankan pavilion in Gartner Symposium 2014. I presented and demonstrated SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 capabilities. Following were the most looked after business requirement
“Error while enabling Windows feature : NetFx3, Error Code : -2146498298 , Please try enabling Windows feature : NetFx3 from Windows management tools and then run setup again. For more information on how to enable Windows features , see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=227143”As certain sources mentioned, I used “Add Roles and Features Wizard” and specified alternate source path to pic relevant files from Windows image. But it still prompted me following error.
On 1st of October 2014 I was honored with the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for SharePoint Server.
It was a dream come true and thanks Microsoft for recognizing the work our community have done.
I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues who helped me to achieve this specially Prabath Fonseka, Wellington Perera, Katherine Chen and Sri Lankan SharePoint community.
It's been a long and arduous journey so far, but the real challenge is just beginning.
When I tried to update field data of a document in a document library using REST api I got Bad Request (400) error message. Surprisingly this was the same code which is working on my office 365 environment. Following is the full error message
“The property 'ContentTypeId' does not exist on type 'SP.ListItem'. Make sure to only use property names that are defined by the type”
Following is the code I used to update the document
The reason for above error is that the type attribute is not compatible in this scenario. I need to provide the exact entity name instead of generic SP.ListItem.
How can I find the entity name for the list? it is very easy. I just need to provide following request.
Following is the entity name that I should use in my code
Following is the modified code that works on my on premises environment as well
https://sp13/sites/dev/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('r')/items(4)Instead of the field value we may get a escaped html string like below.
The reason for this behavior is that the column is enabled for rich text. If we want to keep the rich text input, we may need to escape the string using RegEx for some JavaScript functionality. For an example we can use following script to display expected comment in a textbox.
tmpComment = data.d.AGMComment != null ? data.d.AGMComment.replace("'", "") : "";
$('#txtApprovalComments').val($(tmpComment).text());
After modifying column settings as shown above, following will be the output from the same service call
In SharePoint 2013 workflow architecture is drastically changed when compared with SharePoint 2010. Some new activities like “HttpSend” are introduced to the platform and some activities are improved a lot. On the other hand some scenarios became very hard to implement.
Let’s assume that we have a SharePoint 2013 Visual Studio based workflow and need to assign a task to a user. We expect the notification email to contain the link to respective task. isn’t it ?
In SharePoint 2010 it was very easy to include the task url in the mail. But that is not the case anymore. It’s not possible to include the task url in the default mail. Instead it is sent like below which is not user friendly.
In this post I’ll show a workaround to resolve the problem. Following are the steps we need to perform
1. Add “SingleTask” activity and configure necessary parameters
2. Modify WaitForTaskCompletion property to false
This will avoid the “SingleTask” activity to wait until the approval. Furthermore change “WaiveAssignmentEmail” property value to “Yes” which avoids the notification email.
3. Compose an email manually
In this email I’ll include a link to assigned task. To get the guid of task list, I will use “GetTaskListId” activity. Furthermore I’ll get the task id from “SingleTask” activity output.
From those elements I’ll construct the url of the assigned task
e.g.: “http://sp13/sites/dev/DOAApprovalForm.aspx?List="+taskListId.ToString()+"&ID="+taskItemId+"
Then I’ll construct the email body as I wish
4. Handle Approve or Reject actions using a “Pick” activity
We will use “WaitForFieldChange” activity to pause the workflow until user presses Approve or Reject buttons. Since there are two possible values in the pausing field we need to use a “Pick” activity
5. As mentioned earlier, we will use “WaitForFieldChange” activities on both branches, configured for “TaskOutcome” field.
For the first “WaitForFieldChange” activity, the FieldValue is set to “Approved” and for the other one it is “Rejected”
6. I’ll update the taskOutcome with respective values to continue the workflow
This will allow us to modify email as we wish and pause the workflow until the task is approved or rejected
Sometimes we need to load a div in modal popup instead of a page. Following is an example code that we can use in such scenarios.
In this scenario I use a modal popup to load file upload control in the same page.
