Holger's Blog : sharepoint

Host plain HTML/Javascript page in Web Part (angular/bootstrap)

Holger Vetter — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:17:12 GMT

Today I implemented an example web application using bootstrap/angular which should perform basic CRUD operations on Sharepoint 2010 Lists with rest api.

You can host your complete bootstrap/angular web application in sharepoint and display it in a web part.
To archieve this, first create or use a document library and upload your html/javascript/css files. You have to rename all your .html files to .aspx, because per default sharepoint only shows .aspx files in browsers. When you try to open an .html file from a document library the browser not show it, instead he asks you to download.

After you uploaded your files to a document library you have to create a page.

Page should open automaticly in edit mode after creation. Now click on the “Insert”Ribbon and pick web part. Navigate to “Media and Content” and select the “Page Viewer”. It will host your code in an iframe.

Edit the web part and enter the url to your main/start file (.aspx file) of your web application. Save everything and you are done. If needed modify the height or other properties of the web part to fit your needs.

The result for me looks like this:

InfoPath xml (manifest.xsf) editing with code

Holger Vetter — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:53:00 GMT

When you are extracting an InfoPath file you will get many diffent files, one of them is the manifest.xsf file. I had to modify the manifest.xsf file with C# code and change some values inside the xml.
For this task I used the XmlDocument class from .NET. After I saved the modified file and repacked all InfoPath files back to an .xsn file with the CabPacker tool I recognized that the file can not be opened by InfoPath.
It showed an error about invalid xml. After some reasearch I figured out that the new manifest.xsf looks different that the original one.
Here is an screenshot of the different files (left side: old; right side: new):

As you can see on the right side the XmlDocument class adds a line break before the end tag.

You can disable this by setting “PreserveWhiteSpace” to true.

Now it should work.

CabFilePacker for creating InfoPath CAB files

Holger Vetter — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 17:56:42 GMT

Today I am presenting you a tool which helps you to create an InfoPath (.XSN) file. When you want to edit the manifest.xsf file or any other file in an Infopath form you need to unpack theese files and then edit them. After they were edited I had the problem to pack those into an InfoPath file again. In this blogpost I showed how to do this with makecab.exe which is shipped with Visual Studio. This method works like charm and maybe you ask yourself why to download a tool for this task. The reason is: You don’t have to put all filenames in the script which makecab.exe executes.

CabFilePacker adds all files in the specified folder into a CAB file and then renames the file to InfoPath.xsn. The tool is really easy to use. Just download the files, start and enter the path of the folder.

Download links:
Executable (OneDrive): http://1drv.ms/1en62qh
SourceCode (Visual Studio 2013 Project): https://github.com/daenetCorporation/CabFilePacker

Upgrade InfoPath 2007 document to 2013 without InfoPath Designer

Holger Vetter — Tue, 12 May 2015 11:32:05 GMT

Hello,

in our project we downloaded many InfoPath files from the old sharepoint server.
Now we wanted to upgrade them from “Web Browser Form (InfoPath 2007)” to “Web Browser Form” without opening them all in the InfoPath Designer.

For this I had to unpack the .xsn InfoPath file (for example with 7Zip) and change this in me manifest.xsf file:
Change solutionFormatVersion="2.0.0.0" to solutionFormatVersion="15.0.0.0"

If necessary change Quick Publish Uri in the same file.

Now you have to pack the files you extraced to a CAB file. For this porpuse I used this script:
http://pastebin.com/PqUUp5un
You can use makecab.exe in the windows cmd.
Example command: makecab /F path_to_ddf.ddf

This should a CAB file with the file ending .xsn (only in this case because its in the script, normally makecab creates .cab files)