SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Changing the name of a list or library URL

When working with workflows I’ve realised that it’s best for my list URLs to have no spaces and therefore began to look for a useful solution rather than deleting the list and recreating. Fortunately, this can be done in SharePoint Designer.

  1. Within SharePoint Designer, navigate to ‘All Files’, then Lists. If it’s a library, these should be in the ‘All Files’ folder.
  2. Right click your list and choose ‘Rename’. This renames the list as well as the URL. The same happens for Libraries.
    NameChange1

The outcome is below, before and after…

namechange3namechange2

SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Change where the logo link points to

Within SharePoint, the top left corner there is a logo which usually points to the homepage, read further to determine how to change this.

  1. Open SharePoint Designer and navigate to the Master Pages section.
  2. Edit the Seattle.Master master page in advanced mode.
  3. Search for <SharePoint:SPSimpleSiteLink>
  4. Replace

    <SharePoint:SPSimpleSiteLink CssClass=”ms-siteicon-a” runat=”server” id=”onetidProjectPropertyTitleGraphic”

    <SharePoint:SiteLogoImage CssClass=”ms-siteicon-img” name=”onetidHeadbnnr0″ id=”onetidHeadbnnr2″

    </SharePoint:SPSimpleSiteLink>

    with

    <SharePoint:SPLinkButton NavigateUrl=”your url here” runat=”server” id=”onetidProjectPropertyTitleGraphic”

    <SharePoint:SiteLogoImage CssClass=”ms-siteicon-img” name=”onetidHeadbnnr0″ id=”onetidHeadbnnr2″

    </SharePoint:SPLinkButton>

    The only changes is the parts in bold

So the end result will look similar to this…

logochange

Please note – the edits I’ve done were against the .html page, if you do yours against the .master page, it will look slightly different to this however, the code that needs to be changed still applies.

SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Cascading Dropdowns – how it’s done

If you’ve Googled Cascading Dropdowns you will realise there are various ways of doing this. Due to my background not being a developer of any sort the easiest solution to me was some short code. I’ve explained below the steps for creating this.

  1. Create 3 lists (or more depending on how many cascading levels you require), you don’t need to rename the title column, we can use as is.
  2. Create your master list that has all these drop downs in.
  3. Using the three lists, populate your data, I’ve used mobile networks and their offerings.
    Mobile
  4. Within each list, use a lookup to the previous list and insert the data as required, review the screenshot above for example.
  5. Using your master list, add look-ups to all three different columns and order as required.
  6. Open SharePoint Designer and navigate to your list, create a new ‘NewItem’ form & a new ‘EditForm’.
  7. Edit the forms in advanced mode and search for ‘PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead’.
  8. In this section is where you will paste the following code.
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
    <script src=”https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.3.min.js”></script>
    <script src=”https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery.SPServices/2014.02/jquery.SPServices-2014.02.js”></script><script type=”text/javascript”>

    $(document).ready(function () {

    $().SPServices.SPCascadeDropdowns({
    relationshipList: “Mobile”,
    relationshipListParentColumn: “MobileNetwork”,
    relationshipListChildColumn: “Title”,
    parentColumn: “Mobile Network”,
    childColumn: “Mobile”,
    debug:true
    });

    $().SPServices.SPCascadeDropdowns({
    relationshipList: “Colour”,
    relationshipListParentColumn: “Mobile”,
    relationshipListChildColumn: “Title”,
    parentColumn: “Mobile”,
    childColumn: “Colour”,
    debug:true
    });

    });
    </script>

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

    newformcode

  9. Modify the code slightly to reference your own lists & columns within the lists, save and close. If this was done on the New Item form, do the exact same for the edit form.
  10. Open the list in SharePoint and viola!
    cascadingnewformsp

There are a few different ways of doing this that doesn’t require modification of the forms however, for my own benefits I chose the forms to add this code to.

CSS, SharePoint 2013

How to put the Managed Metadata navigation to the top of the quick launch

There could be a number of reasons as to why this may be useful, my reason being is the quick launch navigation as it is, is rather packed and therefore trying to use this functionality requires a lot of scrolling down every time. Fortunately you can place some script on the page to push the Metadata navigation to the top of the quick launch, code courtesy of Steve Borgwordt.

Within your list, edit the page and insert a Script editor webpart (Found in Media and Content under the Categories section). Add the following code below.

<script src=”https://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

<script>

$(document).ready(function () {

$(‘.ms-tv-box’).remove().prependTo($(‘.ms-core-sideNavBox-removeLeftMargin’));

});

</script>

MetadataNavigation

If you are unable to view the Metadata navigation settings, check the site features to confirm the ‘Metadata Navigation and Filtering’ feature is activated.

SharePoint 2013

Site Permissions – “Sorry, you don’t have access to this page”

Recently I had an issue where a site owner could not access the Site Permissions, List or Library permissions. This was due to an Owner of the site collection removing the permissions for everyone accidentally and then a site collection admin adding them back in. The downside to this is that the owners group is no longer associated to the Access Requests List. The Access Request setting can be turned on or off, the option for Access Request Settings is then in the ribbon under Site Settings – Site Permissions. The resolution to this is to follow the Microsoft KB article here however, the alternate fix would be to just turn access requests off, although this wouldn’t be everyone’s ideal solution.

The Microsoft KB article is also below should the link ever change.

SOLUTION

To resolve this issue, users must be either site collection administrators or be members of the Owners group for the site. The Owners group must also have permissions to access the Access Requests list. Use the following solutions as appropriate for your specific configuration.

Site collection administrator

If an affected user should be a site collection administrator, go to the following Microsoft website for more information about how to manage administrators for your sites:

Manage administrators for a site collection

Add the user to the Owners group for the site

If the user should be a site owner, you must add the user to the Owners group for the site. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. As a user who can change site permissions, browse to the affected site or site collection. Click the gear icon for the Settings menu, and then click Site settings.
  2. Click Site permissions.
  3. Click the Owners group for the site.
  4. Click New.
  5. In the Share dialog box, enter the user account of the user who you want to add to the group. Then, click Share.
  6. Test to verify that the user can now access the list and approve or decline requests.

Make sure that the Owners group has permissions to the Access Requests list

If the Owners group is changed or was removed from the Access requests list, you must add the Owners group permissions for the list. You must also make sure that the affected user is included in the Owners list. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. As a user who has the Manage Permissions Permission Level on the affected site and who also has access to the Access Requests list (for example, a Site Collection administrator), browse to the Access Requests list in Internet Explorer.
  2. Press F12 to open the F12 Developer Tools window.
  3. Click the Network tab, and then press F5 to enable network traffic capturing.
  4. Refresh the Access Requests page in Internet Explorer. After the page has loaded, press Shift+F5 to stop capturing network traffic.
  5. In the Developer Tools window, double-click the first result in the URL list. This URL ends in “pendingreq.aspx.”
  6. In the Developer Tools window, click Request body.
  7. In the search box, type pagelistid:, and then press Enter.Note The search highlights the pageListId text.
  8. Copy the GUID that follows the pageListId. The GUID will be between an opening brace ( { ) character and a closing brace ( } ) character as follows:
    {GUID}

    Note Include the opening and closing brace characters when you copy the GUID. This GUID is the identifier for the SharePoint Online Access Requests list for your organization.

  9. In the browser address bar, enter https://<URL<URL of affected site or site collection>/_layouts/15/ListEdit.aspx?List=<{GUID}>, and then press Enter.Note In this address, <URL of affected site or site collection> represents the URL for the site collection in which you want to change the access requests (for example, https://contoso.sharepoint.com). And <{GUID}> represents the GUID that you copied in step 8.
  10. On the Settings page, click Permissions for this list.
  11. Make sure that the Owners group for the site is included in the list of permissions for the Access Requests list. If the Owners group for the site collection does not exist, click Grant Permissions, enter the name of the Owners group for the site in the Share dialog box, and then click Share.
  12. Follow the steps in the “Add the user to the Owners group for the site” section to make sure that the user is included in the Owners group.
Powershell

Export List / Library to App Centre

The below script allows you to export a list or library from SharePoint with or without content to the app centre.

$web = Get-SPWeb "WEB URL"
$list = $web.Lists["LIST NAME"]
$list.SaveAsTemplate("TEMPLATE NAME","TEMPLATE TITLE", "TEMPLATE DESCRIPTION", (INCULDE DATA)$true/$false)
SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Breadcrumbs for SharePoint 2013

By default SharePoint 2013 doesn’t have breadcrumbs which was a useful feature to navigate back in your SharePoint site. Luckily, this feature hasn’t been removed, instead this has been hidden within the master page. To activate this, follow the steps below.

  1. Within SharePoint Designer navigate to the Master Pages section.
  2. Right click the seattle.master master page and copy, paste this in the open space below to create a new master page then rename this.
    breadcrumbs2
  3. Right click your new master page and edit in advanced mode. Press Ctrl F and find ‘breadcrumb’, following the highlighted parts in the screenshot below, delete the  – style=”display:none;” and change the Visible=”false” to true, your results should look like the second screenshot below.
    breadcrumbscodebreadcrumbscode2
  4. Lastly, add the code below just before the closing </div>
    <script type=”text/javascript”>

    document.getElementById(“GlobalBreadCrumbNavPopout-anchor”).innerHTML='<img style=”border-width:0;position:absolute;left:-215px !important;top:-120px !important;” alt=”Navigate Up” src=”/_layouts/15/images/spcommon.png?rev=27″>’;

    </script>
    breadcrumbscode3

If however you have the Site Collection Feature ‘SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure’ and site feature ‘SharePoint Server Publishing’ activated, you will need to make these changes to the html version instead.

SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Modifying New Item form to delete/rearrange columns

Another request I’ve had is to hide columns on the new item form which in my case required the use of SharePoint Designer again. Details below.

  1. Within SharePoint Designer navigate to your list, create a new item form and edit in advanced mode (right click to edit in advanced mode).
    editformeditinadvancedmode
  2. Search for your column name and highlight the code within the <tr></tr>, this can then be re-arranged in order or deleted as per the below, save the form and preview in browser.
    newformremovecolumn
SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013

Promoted Links – Change amount per row and next page icon

While testing promoted links I came across an issue whereby I had too many links on a row and was displaying an arrow to view the rest of the icons which looked fairly awful. A way around this was to use a Script Editor WebPart to modify the page layout through CSS.

  1. On the page displaying the Promoted Links, click the cog and go edit page.
  2. Add the Script Editor WebPart which can be found under ‘Media and Content’.
  3. On the right side of the Script Editor WebPart you will see ‘EDIT SNIPPET’, click this and insert the code below into it.
    The first part of the code limits the amount of links per row, each tile has a default of 160px, so depending on the amount per row its 160*… The second part hides the arrows if there’s more items that you are currently unable to see.

    <style>
    /*display rows of 6 items*/
    .ms-promlink-body {
    width: 960px;
    }
    </style>

    <style>
    /*hide the arrows when you have more items than viewable*/
    .ms-promlink-header{
    display:none;
    }
    </style>

SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer

Prevent users from editing a column

A recent request I had was to prevent users from editing a column once the item had been created. This had to be done in SharePoint Designer, sure you can get around this with the quick edit option in SharePoint however, in my list quick edit was turned off to prevent this.

  1. Open SharePoint Designer and navigate to the list, create a new edit form and edit in advanced mode.
  2. Look for your column name and find the control mode within the SharePoint:FormField line. You will notice the ControlMode is usually set to ControlMode=”Edit”, change this to ControlMode=”Display”, save the form and check SharePoint for the results.<td width=”400px” valign=”top” class=”ms-formbody”>
    <SharePoint:FormField runat=”server” id=”ff6{$Pos}” ControlMode=”Display” FieldName=”DueDate” __designer:bind=”{ddwrt:DataBind(‘u’,concat(‘ff6′,$Pos),’Value’,’ValueChanged’,’ID’,ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),’@DueDate’)}”/>
    <SharePoint:FieldDescription runat=”server” id=”ff6description{$Pos}” FieldName=”DueDate” ControlMode=”Edit”/>
    </td>

    The end result is shown below, this is the edit form in SharePoint.
    DueDate