Using SPFilterDropdown to Reorder Options in a Dropdown on a SharePoint Form

Many times when you have a dropdown column in your lists, you’d like to show the values sorted in a different order than alphabetically. Sure, you can use a Choice column and order the choices in any way you’d like. However, in the cases where you want the dopdown to be based on a Site…

But Is jQuery Already Loaded?

Many end users are taking advantage of all of the goodness that jQuery provides, whether by adding simple effects like a sliding Quick Launch, more sophisticated form enhancements like SPCascadeDropdowns from SPServices, or even writing their own scripts for more complex solutions. More than ever, the distinction between “end user” and “developer” is blurring. IMO,…

SharePoint Saturday Boston and SharePoint Conference .ORG

I’ve had a wonderful time over the last four days as an attendee and speaker at two great SharePoint events. The first one was SharePoint Saturday Boston, right in my own backyard at Microsoft’s offices in Waltham, MA. Helping Pradeepa Siva, Talbott Crowell (@talbott), and Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) with the organizing a bit certainly gave…

Working with SharePoint People Pickers with jQuery: A New Function Called findPeoplePicker

[notice]2012-09-07 – Note that I’ve added a more robust version of this function into SPServices v0.7.2, which at this writing is in beta but will be released soon. See the docs for SPFindPeoplePicker.[/notice] I was working with several People Pickers in a form for a client project last week where I needed to set or…

When to Choose SPServices vs. the Client Side Object Model (CSOM)

Mark Rackley (@MrAckley) and I had a Twonversation with Jeff Jones (@SPJeff) about a month ago about when it is good to use SharePoint’s Client Side Object Model (CSOM) over SPServices. You can see the important bits of that conversation in the image to the right. (Yeah, it’s taken us forever to get this post done. I…

Bug in SPServices v0.7.1 with UpdateListItems Fixed in v0.7.1a

I’ll admit that I sometimes make mistakes. Here’s a clear one. When I made some changes to the way I initialize the default options in SPServices to help slim down the footprint, I missed testing a few things. Luckily, alert SPServices user mbroschat caught it very soon after I released v0.7.1 and I was able to…

jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) v0.7.1 Released

Today I’m releasing SPServices v0.7.1. If you are using an earlier version of SPServices, I strongly suggest that you upgrade to this version. Not only does it have some cool new stuff in it, I’ve managed to squeeze some considerable performance improvments out of some of the most used functions, like SPCascadeDropdowns and SPDisplayRelatedInfo. In my…