Tag: Coding

Obtaining a JavaScript Reference to a SharePoint Field

JavaScript, SharePoint
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SharePoint Logo[This article should be considered deprecated.  The code represented has been improved, extended and made available as the DP_SharePoint Function Library.  All future effort will be applied there.]

I’ve been digging further and further into the bowels of SharePoint.  It’s not a pleasant place to dig.  At my company end-users and team-site owners are prohibited from doing any back-end development.  Additionally, due to various political issues, there are currently no available processes to contract for such work (although you can be added to an ever-growing waiting list).  The only development path open to site owners is client-side JavaScript.

On the team-site I manage one of the most used features is a custom list cataloging enterprise Incidents managed by the team.  Each incident is logged with information about the applications affected, the team engagement times and many other pieces of information.  The list feeds business customer reports and generates performance metrics for upper management.  With over 20 people on the team the quality of information can be rather shaky.  It would benefit greatly from some simple validation and a few points of automation.

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Sunday Coding Humor

Development
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Having been doing more development recently and revisting code abstraction components that I’d written years ago but that are still proving insanely useful I imagined this little dialog in my head.  I hope that I’m not the only coder out there that can relate to this.  First when you’re building the component:

Writing a new component is like giving your furture self a thumbs up and big, goofy grin. Hey, older self, I think you'll need to this again! You're aces!

Followed potentially years later when you’re still finding uses for it:

Using an old component to solve a new problem is like seeing your past self give you a thumbs up and a big, goofy grin. Thanks, younger self, I did need to do that again!

Happy coding!

Update of DP_DateExtensions to Correct Parsing Error

JavaScript
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A slight update to my JavaScript date extensions, DP_DateExtensions, is available for download.  This release addresses another issue related to paring of “AM” and “PM” indicators.  The gist of the problem was that the parser was transversing Noon and Midnight.

I had two bugs.  When I encountered a PM indicator I was simply adding 12 to the “hours” value if it were less than 13.  Of course 12 noon plus 12 hours is midnight the next day.  I needed to check for “less than 12” not “less than 13”.  However I also wasn’t taking any action if the indicator was AM – which left 12 AM as “12”, or noon, in the resulting 24 hour clock representation.  If the indicator were AM I needed to check if the hours were 12 and set them to zero if so.

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New Version of DP_DateExtensions and Some Esoteric Integer Parsing

JavaScript
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[Actually the “new” version is nearly a month old at this point but I forgot to do an entry to announce it.]

There’s a new version of my JavaScript date extensions, DP_DateExtensions, available.  This release fixes a significant, but interesting bug brought to my attention by Kevin Warnke.  He noticed that, sometimes, when you parsed a date with a 12-hour clock the resulting time was simply wrong – often off by weeks.  This, for some reason, annoyed him.

After digging I did find (and fix) the problem.  As you might expect to parse a time with a 12-hour time you need to take the time given and add 12 to it (if “PM”) to convert it to a 24-hour clock.  To do this I did some simple addition:

Hours = Hours + 12;

This worked fine in most cases.  However if “Hours” had leading zero, like “04” JavaScript treats this as a string and would result in “0412” rather than “16” as you might expect.  However when adding the value to a date JavaScript happily treats it as a number – so instead of adding 16 hours to my new date this resulted in adding 412 hours – or over 17 extra days!

Although there are many ways to fix this I decided to force the conversion by using the parseInt() function like so (the “10” indicates that you want to parse the value as base 10):

Hours = parseInt(Hours, 10) + 12;

This fixed the problem nicely.  In the end, a pretty silly error that I should have caught much sooner.

New Version of DP_DateExtensions

JavaScript
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I’ve just uploaded a major update to my venerable (6 years-old!) JavaScript date extensions DP_DateExtensions.  This was a near-complete rewrite of the component and like most hard (and some great) work it started with an error.

The question Alexey Vassiliev (who reported the bug) asked me is “how many days are there between March 1, 2012 and March 31, 2012?”  Assuming Midnight for both dates the common sense answer is, of course, 30 days.  My component however was returning 29 days… why?

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