Been Quite Awhile

Just checked the last time I’ve posted an entry and found that it was Oct. 31st, been a little busy; probably will get a chance to write after my current contract is up and I have some time…

AJAX style QuickView Properties Box for ListViews

As much as I hate played out buzzwords such as “AJAX,” I couldn’t bring myself to come up with a better way to describe something i’ve been working on for the last two days for a client.  I guess i’ll approach this from a problem, followed by solution format (all in the name of originality)

 

THE PROBLEM

Simply stated, from a useability perspective; it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have to navigate to a seperate page to view additional details about an item you are currently viewing, among a whole lot of other items on the same page.  The context menu within a listview/doc library item makes you do just this. 

 

Before:

 
After:

 

 

 

Before & After

 

THE SOLUTION

There are a few players involved here.  The important one on the SharePoint side of the fence is an ISAPI extension known as owssvr.dll.  This is the what generates the xml representing all property information for any given list item (It does a whole lot more, read up here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms478653.aspx).  A typical request looks something like the following:

http://[Web_name/]_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Method_name[&Parameter1=Value1&Parameter2=Value2...]

If you’re wondering why we aren’t just using one of the many web services provided with the default installation; it mainly has to do with the fact that that owssvr.dll allows for a REST style interface that makes it much easier to to simply alter the query string paramters; rather than using a library like JQuery to post data to the service.

On the client side, we have the XMLHttpRequest object (the Microsoft.XMLHTTP activex object to be specific;) which gives us the ability to retrieve the xml provided by owssvr.dll in order to process and convert it into html, instantaneously; without post-back 

The “processing” of the xml that eventually yields html happens client side as well; through the magic of xsl (and SharePoint designer will aid in the process of generating it.)

In the next installment, i’ll walk you through the steps of putting this all together-