SPServices Stories #14: Create a Slide Show in SharePoint 2010 using an Announcements List and SPServices

Introduction

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new SPServices Story. This one was sitting in my draft bucket for way too long, so a big sorry goes out to Trace Armstrong (@TraceBArmstrong).

Trace wrote this post about using SPServices to drive a slideshow using an announcements list as the source. This is the sort of common use case that SPServices often sits behind as part of the underlying plumbing.

If you’re using SharePoint 2013 or Office365 running the 15 wave, you might say that one should use REST instead, and that’s an option of course. The nice thing about using SPServices for stuff like this is that if you are on SharePoint 2007 or 2010 or 2013, the SPServices calls are exactly the same. So in a sense, we’ve got easily upgraded code.

Note: I’ve made a few small changes to Trace’s code. One change was to replace .find(“[nodeName=’z:row’]”) with .SPFilterNode(“z:row”). This is required to make things work with up to date versions of jQuery.

Create a Slide Show in SharePoint 2010 using an Announcements List and SPServices

By Trace Armstrong

Recently, I had a client who wanted a different slide show for their SharePoint 2010 intranet home page. The original slide show ran using a custom web part that integrated the Nivo Slider, a jQuery based solution. The solution worked great but the person maintaining the news portion of the slider needed a no-code solution for easier updating.

I searched the Internet for a solution and came across this blog (https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/Creating-your-own-Content-Slider-for-SharePoint.aspx) by Eric on http://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com. The solution was similar to what I needed but my task also required a place for slideshow images.

The first step was using the Announcements list for the announcements slider. I then created two custom list columns, “Image” and “Body”. The “Image” column is a “Hyperlink or Picture” column type and “Body” is a “multiple lines of text” column type.

Using Eric’s model, I referenced SP Services, jQuery, jShowoff, and set about editing the JavaScript code to pull an image column from the Announcements list.

The revised JavaScript looks like this:

$(document).ready(function () {
  var emptyResults = "<div class='sliderDiv'><p class='announceTitle'>Company Name</p></div>";
  var maxVal = 0;
  var toShow = false;
  var heightTemp = 0;
  $().SPServices({
    operation : "GetListItems",
    async : false,
    listName : "Announcements",
    CAMLViewFields : "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name='Title' /><FieldRef Name='Image' /><FieldRef Name='Body' /><FieldRef Name='Modified' /></ViewFields>",
    CAMLQuery : "<Query><OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Created' /></OrderBy>" + "<Where><Or><Geq><FieldRef Name='Expires' /><Value Type='DateTime'>" + "<Today /></Value></Geq><IsNull><FieldRef Name='Expires' /></IsNull></Or></Where></Query>",

    completefunc : function (xData, Status) {
      var itemCount = $(xData.responseXML).SPFilterNode("rs:data").attr("ItemCount");
      if (itemCount > 0) {
        toShow = true;

        $(xData.responseXML).SPFilterNode("z:row").each(function () {
          var modDate = $(this).attr("ows_Modified");
          modDate = modDate.substr(5, 2) + "/" + modDate.substr(8, 2) + "/" + modDate.substr(0, 4);

          var titleHtml = "<div class='sliderDiv'><p class='announceTitle'>" + $(this).attr("ows_Title") + "</p>";
          var imgBody = "<img class='anImage' src='" + $(this).attr("ows_Image").split(',')[0] + "'></img>";
          var bodyHtml = "<p class='announceBody'>" + $(this).attr("ows_Body") + "</p>";
          var expireHtml = "<p class='announceFooter'>Modified: <span>" + modDate + "</span></p></div>";

          //div announcements is added by jshowoff js.

          $("#announcements").append(titleHtml + imgBody + bodyHtml + expireHtml);

        });

      } else {

        $("#announcements").append(emptyResults);

      }

    } //completefunc

  }); //SPServices

  if (toShow == true) {
    $('.sliderDiv').each(function () {
      heightTemp = $(this).height();
      if (heightTemp > maxVal) {
        maxVal = heightTemp
      };
    });
    $('#announcements').css('min-height', maxVal);
    $('#announcements').jshowoff({
      speed : 12000,
      changeSpeed : 3000,
      controls : true,
      animatePause : false,
      effect : 'fade',
      cssClass : true,
      links : true
    });
  } //if stm
}); //ready

I edited a few syntax issues that were unnecessary to the solution and created/referenced a new variable, “imgBody”. The variable adds the img class “anImage” and retrieves the slide show image from the list column “Image”. One of the problems in the solution was SharePoint adding a comma to the end of the file name. The split property removes the comma and the image displayed as intended on the site.

The solution appears like this on the client’s main page.

This solution enabled the company to have a no-code update to their main page news slider using an image library and the Announcements list.