Category / Master Page

by Simon Doy

Introducing SPUrlExpressionBuilder to resolve SharePoint URL Tokens


Introduction

One of the great things when developing with SharePoint is being able to use URL tokens such as:-

  • ~SiteCollection – this will resolve to the current site collection root
  • ~Site – this will resolve to the current web root

For an extensive list of SharePoint URL tokens, take a look at Namwar Rizvi’s SharePoint Insight blog post, http://sharepoint-insight.com/2008/12/01/list-of-sharepoint-url-tokens/.

If you have done much with creating or modifying Master Pages or Page Layouts then these tokens become very useful to locate resources such as images, XSL or CSS files.

For example, to reference an image which is stored in a SharePoint Publishing web’s Site Collection Images folder you could use something like this:-

~SiteCollection/SiteCollectionImages/myimage.png.

Recently, I have been working with multiple language user interfaces and wanted to be able to display a different image based on the language. One of the steps to do this was to work out how to process these URL Tokens.

Solution

This is where the SPUrlExpressionBuilder class comes to the rescue. This class is part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls assembly.

To evaluate a string with a url token like ~SiteCollectionUrl/Images/MyImage.png you can use the following SPUrlExpressionBuilder class’s method EvaluateUrlExpression().

string imagePath = SPUrlExpressionBuilder.EvaluateUrlExpression("~SiteCollection/Images/myimage.png").ToString();

 

by Simon Doy

Fix: Content Editor Web Part Rich Text Editor Popup fails to display


 

Introduction

This problem has been bugging me for the past 3 days and so I thought I’d be kind and document it just in case it has been causing someone else problems.

So the issue is with the SharePoint 2007 Content Editor Web Part and when you edit the web part and click the button to show the Rich Text Editor you get a JavaScript error.

There does seem to be another post on MSDN (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-NZ/sharepointcustomization/thread/90e14ff3-7003-44fd-9b4c-d9e654f7d8e1 that was showing the same issue and although the fix was related, the fixes that were specified in this post didn’t help me.

 

Issue

So as I have already mentioned when using the SharePoint 2007 Content Editor Web Part’s Rich Text Editor Dialog you get the following JavaScript error:-

Invalid Argument in HtmlEditor.js at line 5740, character position 2

On further investigation it is this line in the HtmlEditor.js file that is causing the problem.

elem=document.getElementByid(containerId);

Actually if you follow the JavaScript code then the issue seems to be down to the piece of JavaScript where the web parts are registered on the page. At the bottom of each SharePoint page is a section of JavaScript that looks something like this:-

 1: <script LANGUAGE='Javascript'>


  

 2: <!--


  

 3: WPSC.Init(document);


  

 4: var varPartWPQ1 = WPSC.WebPartPage.Parts.Register('WPQ1','[GUID]',document.all.item('WebPartWPQ1'));


  

 5: WPSC.WebPartPage.WebURL = 'http:\u002f\u002fsharepointurl';


  

 6: WPSC.WebPartPage.WebServerRelativeURL = '\u002f';


  

 7: //-->


  

 8: </script>

It seems that the JavaScript which creates the varPartWPQ1 variable does not work properly as the varPartWPQ1 is created without populating its ID property. This ID property is the value that is assigned to containerId in the line:-

elem=document.getElementByid(containerId);

 

The Solution

After a lot of trial and error I found that it was to do with the master page and a <meta> tag within the master page’s <head> tag.

The tag causing the problem is this one:-

 1: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

Removing this line and redeploying the master page fixed the JavaScript error.

This meta tag tells IE to run in IE 8 Standards mode which seems to cause a problem with the browser when its trying to get a document item using the function document.all.item([itemid]).

For more information on the <meta> tag please see the following article on Defining Document Compatability (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx)

 

Further Information

The reason for this happening was actually that the master page was being ported back from a SharePoint 2010 master page to a SharePoint 2007 master page.

This tag was left in from the SharePoint 2010 master page.

I really do hope this helps someone as it drove me mad for a while.