jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services v0.5.2 Released

It’s a little late, but I wanted to get a blog post out about v0.5.2.  I released in on Sunday, March 7.  Since then there have already been almost 200 downloads! Also see my prior post for information about the library with SharePoint 2010.

There was one interesting thing I dealt with in this release which had to do with making sure that SPCascadeDropdowns works with non-English sites.  There’s only so much testing I can do, and I don’t have a non-English site set up anywhere.  It turns out that the values that SharePoint uses for the Titles of dropdown columns actually vary from language to language.  I can sort of see the utility in this, but I had assumed that it wouldn’t happen.  (Never assume. Always test.) So the .NET labels stay English, but the SharePoint labels vary.  The specific issue was one that was pointed out by jasminegarry85. She wasn’t having any luck getting SPCascadeDropdowns to work with multi-select columns.  In my selectors, I was looking for:

Left side: columnName + ” possible values”

Right side: columnName + ” selected values”

Turns out that  ” possible values” and  ” selected values” in her Norwegian site were ” mulige verdier” and [whatever ” selected values” is in Norwegian]. It wasn’t hard to fix, but obviously a mistaken assumption on my part that the language would stay English.  I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard about this from anyone earlier, but for all of you non-English speakers out there, you should be all set.  I went through the rest of the code and didn’t see anything else egregious, but let me know if you have any other problems with other language-based sites.

One other thing that I sort of like that I added was a randomizer option for SPArrangeChoices. Depending on what you are using your radio button or checkbox column for, you may want to reduce choice order prejudice.  By this, I mean that people tend to make selections toward the top of long lists of options.  By using the randomizer option, you can ensure that people will see things in a different order every time.  Hopefully this can help you to gather more valid data.

As usual, the rest of the release notes are below.

Release Notes New Functionality Issue Tracker Item Function Operation Description 5429 $().SPServices.SPSetMultiSelectSizes NA Added minWidth and maxWidth options to the function. If either value is non-zero, then they provide the lower and upper bounds (in pixels) for the width of the multi-select boxes. NA $().SPServices.SPDisplayRelatedInfo NA Added a case for Currency to the showColumn function (internal function) to improve formatting. 5420 $().SPServices.SPArrangeChoices NA Added a randomize option, which reorders the options randomly to remove choice order prejudice. New Operations Web Service Operation Options MSDN Documentation People SearchPrincipals searchText, maxResults, principalType People.SearchPrincipals Method Permissions AddPermission objectName, objectType, permissionIdentifier, permissionType, permissionMask Permissions.AddPermission Method   AddPermissionCollection objectName, objectType, permissionsInfoXml Permissions.AddPermissionCollection Method   RemovePermission objectName, objectType, permissionIdentifier, permissionType Permissions.RemovePermission Method   RemovePermissionCollection objectName, objectType, memberIdsXml Permissions.RemovePermissionCollection Method   UpdatePermission objectName, objectType, permissionIdentifier, permissionType, permissionMask Permissions.UpdatePermission Method (Addresses Issue Tracker items 5478 and 5363) Bug Fixes and Efficiency Issue Tracker Item Function Operation Description 5425 $().SPServices.SPCascadeDropdowns NA Cascading drop downs in another language NA $().SPServices.SPArrangeChoices NA More efficient code to reduce unnecessary DOM traversal.