KWizCom is going to SharePoint Saturday Toronto!

This month KWizCom is going to the first-ever SharePoint Saturday Toronto and you are invited to come along!

KWizCom is proud to participate in and sponsor this grass-roots event. SharePoint Saturday events are free, community-focused SharePoint events dedicated to educating and engaging members of the local technical community.

SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics. Amongst them will be KWizCom's own VP R&D Shai Petel, who will be presenting a session on "Delegate Controls: What, Where and How"

KWizCom representatives will be amongst a select group of vendors with a booth at SharePoint Saturday. Come talk to us and learn about the many opportunities and benefits of working with KWizCom!
We have prepared a special gift for everyone who visits our booth but you have to attend to benefit!

SharePoint Saturday Toronto will take place:
On: Saturday, July 11th, 2009
At: Microsoft Canada Conference Centre
1950 Meadowvale Blvd, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

The day starts at 9:00 AM with a short introductory keynote and ends at 4:30 PM.
Lunch will be provided and there will be numerous giveaways throughout the day.
Come join us for a day of fun, learning, networking and – SharePoint!

Register for the event
For more information, please visit www.sharepointsaturday.org/toronto.

Radio Button Custom Field Choice – Going from Vertical to Horizontal with Java Script

By Roi Kolbinger - SharePoint Consultant
KWizCom Professional Services – http://www.kwizcom.com/

Have you noticed that field choice only gives a vertical view?
But what if I want a horizontal view?
When you want to customize your view but don't know how it can be very frustrating but there is always a way, you just have to know how…

For example:
I want to use the field "Gender" with two choice options – male and female.
This is how such a field would normally look in MOSS:




But I don't want to waste so much screen space. It would be much better to have something like this:



With a little Java script it's not so hard to go from vertical to horizontal. Here's how you do it:
Simply add this code to the form (add it in the SPD to NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx for the list that includes the view you want to change):



That all – now we have our Male/Female options in the desired view layout!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For more helpful tips and guidelines please visit: http://kwizcom.blogspot.com/
NEW – You can now follow KWizCom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KWizCom

Creating a field in a List and getting the error: "Index was outside the bounds of the array"

Today, while I was code reviewing a new release of our rating field type I got a weird error message...

We added a new feature that adds 2 read only fields with the total number of ratings and number of comments.

Code example for addnig new fields was simple:

if (!list.Fields.ContainsField(ratingField.FieldName_NumOfCommentsInternalName))
{
list.Fields.Add(ratingField.FieldName_NumOfCommentsDecodedName, SPFieldType.Number, false);
//Some more logic here
}

Pretty simple, only when this code runs this time (3rd unit testing sessions before release to customer review) suddenly I get the error message above "Index was outside the bounds of the array".

Well... I ran it in debug few time, scratching my head few times more, but nothing - same error every time!

OK, time for drilling into SharePoint code I guess...
The exception stack trace was as following:

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPStringUtility.EscapedCodeToLower(String str)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.FixFieldV3Attrs(XmlDocument xd, XmlElement xe, Guid& fid, String& name)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.TranslateFieldSchema(String schemaXml, Guid& fid, String& strDisp, String& strStaticNew)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.AddFieldAsXmlInternal(String schemaXml, Boolean addToDefaultView, SPAddFieldOptions op)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.AddFieldAsXml(String schemaXml, Boolean addToDefaultView, SPAddFieldOptions op)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.AddFieldAsXml(String strXml)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.AddInternal(String strDisplayName, SPFieldType type, Boolean bRequired, Boolean bCompactName, Guid lookupListId, Guid lookupWebId, StringCollection choices)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.Add(String strDisplayName, SPFieldType type, Boolean bRequired, Boolean bCompactName, StringCollection choices)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldCollection.Add(String strDisplayName, SPFieldType type, Boolean bRequired)
at KWizCom.SharePoint.Rating.ListRatingUtilities.CreateRatingCountFieldsInList(SPWeb web, SPList list, RatingField ratingField)

Revealing that the exception was raised from a method called:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPStringUtility.EscapedCodeToLower(String str)

So far - makes sense... string parsing is always the number one cause for index bound exceptions, right?

So, I wanted to check what was wrong with the field name I was trying to create...

ratingField.FieldName_NumOfCommentsDecodedName "2Rating Site Column_x" string

See that my field name ends with "_x"...

The code I extracted from "EscapedCodeToLower" had the following line in it:

if (((str[i] == '_') && (i < (str.Length - 1))) && (str[i + 1] == 'x'))

Well, now everything was clear to me.

Microsoft uses "XmlConvert.EncodeName" in order to encode fields internal names in SharePoint. This encoding method replaces illegal characters with "_x0020_" for example. Apparently this method looks up every "_" that was followed by "x" and assumes it is a token it needs to decode... But what happens if my text ends with "_x"?

Aha! You get your "Index was outside the bounds of the array" exception!

So, I guess now I have to add a check to my code. I Doubt anyone would notice it or bother to fix it.

Well, I googled that error message regarding SPList.Fields.Add and got nothing - hopefully this will help someone in need in the future...

Shai.