Category: Designing

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Designing Developing

white-space: nowrap in SharePoint

I looked for hours! I can’t find this thing anywhere else on the internet! There must be a complete group of developers and designers that have been struggling with this before! I can’t believe I’m supposed to be the first one to put this solution on the world wide web.

All I wanted to do is to disable the wordwrap in a specific div in SharePoint, like so:

white-space: nowrap;

It worked perfectly in all browsers, except for… That’s right! Internet Explorer!

After struggling for half a day I finally found out that SharePoint inserts another piece of styling called word-wrap. This is the SharePoint code:

word-wrap: break-word;

All I had to do is override this in my own style and voila, it finally works!

And now the working style looks like this:

white-space: nowrap;word-wrap: normal;
Categories
Configuring Designing Developing Good to know SharePoint Talk

Sharepoint 2007 developing and designing: Best practices

I have done a few years of sharepoint developing now. When I began to write small webparts in Sharepoint I was very enthusiastic about the features of the Sharepoint framework and thought it was as easy and solid as writing ASP.NET. Now I know better, developing Sharepoint masterpages, webparts, workflows, etc. is not all beer and skitties. Also when you haven’t encountered any troubles yet, you will get to it! So don’t waste your effort on developing the wrong way.

Here are some points of what I consider “Sharepoint 2007 developing and designing: Best practices”

Developing

  • Sharepoint Designer is crap. It´s instable and unfinished. So, try to avoid it where possible. Try to use Visual Studio instead.
  • Use Microsofts Visual Studio extensions for WSS. Always use the latest version: CTP, Beta or RC? It all did work for me, so just use it. Here’s a link to the latest version: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FB9D4B85-DA2A-432E-91FB-D505199C49F6&displaylang=en
  • Always use embedded resources, never copy your images, css or javascripts to a folder in the 12 hive. An article on how to use embedded resources can be found here: http://aspalliance.com/726
  • Important! Before developing get you’re Functional Requirements straightened out. It is very important to know if you are going to create an application that is going to be updated (frequently) AND/OR needs to work in other environments, for example an ASP.NET environment AND/OR if it needs to be compatible with other/future versions of sharepoint. If it does, and the most cases will be, then mind the following points
    • Try to use the Sharepoint controls in the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace as less as possible. Some controls contain some bugs and off course this way you can easily use the same application in an ASP.NET webpage or implement it in another version of Sharepoint.
    • Create a tiered application. Create for every tier a new project. Create a SharepointData project which handles all data between your project and sharepoint, like users, groups, properties, lists, libraries
    • Try to avoid the use of the IWebEditable interface and the EditorPart class. Handle configurations in a second webpart where only an admin can touch it.

Designing (Master pages)

  • Again. SharePoint Designer is crap, but with designing a master page we cannot evade the piece of beta-software Microsoft has shipped with SharePoint. So, good luck with the frustrations.
  • A disadvantage of Sharepoint is that you cannot deploy a masterpage centralized, you have to do a copy-paste job to create the same look on all sites. Fortunately I have a feature for globally deploying masterpages. In a few steps you can build your own feature, it’s very easy. Here is the article: http://www.dontpapanic.com/blog/?p=36
  • WARNING! NEVER EVER overwrite the default masterpage located at 12TEMPLATEGLOBAL but use it only to copy, it would be wise to make a backup of it.
  • I discourage the use of a minimalistic masterpage.  Use the default sharepoint masterpage located at <%System Drive%>Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12TEMPLATEGLOBAL as you’re base masterpage. Generally implementing a new design will take less effort when tweaking the default masterpage, than creating a new one based on a minimalistic base masterpage.

These are the important points that have been in my head for a while, finally they got stored in HTML and are they readable for others. Did I miss something or do you have any tips yourself? I ‘ll be glad to know.