SharePoint AJAX Toolkit

Source code checked in, #60740

daniellarson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:42:54 GMT

Fixes some issues introduced with pending webkit fix. XHTMLComponent still incompatible with WebKit. (XmlComponent is all good though).

Source code checked in, #60540

daniellarson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:24:34 GMT

Resolves EnableHistory bug, where the SP AJAX ClientRuntimeManager can set EnableHistory too late in the lifecycle (after the init event) and cause an exception.

New Post: IE Performance

trentfoley — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:41:10 GMT

Hey Dan,

This is Trent over at Raytheon. I am working with Social Sites, as well as rolling some of my own web parts using your framework.

IE 6 and 7 (I haven't tried IE 8) seem to really choke when rendering the asynchronous content, not sure if it is a mulit-threading issue or what. FireFox hums right through it. What happens is the page appears to load but remains frozen until all the ajax web parts completely render.

The page load time is directly correlated to the number of ajax web parts on the page. Just to give you an idea, on a standard community page with 4 Ajax web parts, IE 7 will hang for about 15 seconds. If I remove all the web parts, the hang time goes down to about 3 seconds (probably due to the ajax controls on the page that are not webparts).

Have you experienced this yourself, and if so, do you have any suggestions for tweaks we can make to prevent the browser hang.

Thanks,

Trent

New Post: Browser Compatibility

nickdelrosario — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:19:16 GMT

Hi,

I just wanted to find out if you guys had a list of known browser compatibility and the versions of each for SharePoint Ajax Toolkit?

Regards,

Nick

New Post: AutoCompleteExtender does not work in SharePoint web part

stock — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:22:03 GMT

Hi,

I use AutoCompleteExtender in SharePoint (SP) web part project. Here is the details:

1. I use WSPBuilder (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder) to build my SP web part. The web part has Ajax feature. That is ScriptManager exists on the sharepoint page. In the CreateChildControls method of the web part, I have these code:

private AutoCompleteExtender autoComplete = new AutoCompleteExtender();

private TextBox TB_SearchSubject = new TextBox();

protected override void CreateChildControls()

{

base.CreateChildControls();

TB_SearchSubject.ID = "TB_SearchSubject";

TB_SearchSubject.Width = 120;

this.Controls.Add(TB_SearchSubject);

System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl div = new System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl();

div.ID = "ListPlacement";

div.Attributes["style"] = "height:300px; overflow-y:scroll;";

this.Controls.Add(div);

autoComplete.ID = "AutoComplete1";

autoComplete.MinimumPrefixLength = 1;

autoComplete.CompletionSetCount = 20;

autoComplete.CompletionInterval = 1000;

autoComplete.DelimiterCharacters = ";, :";

autoComplete.CompletionListElementID = "ListPlacement";

autoComplete.EnableCaching = true;

autoComplete.ServicePath = "../12/TEMPLATE/LAYOUTS/AutoCompleteWebService.asmx";

autoComplete.ServiceMethod = "GetSubjects";

autoComplete.TargetControlID = "TB_SearchSubject";

//autoComplete.ContextKey = "SubjectID|CLL";

this.Controls.Add(autoComplete);

}

2. The web service file AutoCompleteWebService.asmx has this code:

[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]

[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]

[System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService]

public class AutoCompleteWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService

{

[System.Web.Services.WebMethod]

[System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptMethod]

public string[] GetSubjects(string prefixText, int count, string contextKey)

{

if (count == 0)

{

count = 10;

}

List<string> items = new List<string>(count);

ArrayList arr_test = new ArrayList();

arr_test.Add("ab");

arr_test.Add("kg");

arr_test.Add("iq");

arr_test.Add("le");

arr_test.Add("cd");

for (int i = 0; i < arr_test.Count; i++)

{

items.Add(AjaxControlToolkit.AutoCompleteExtender.CreateAutoCompleteItem(arr_test[i].ToString(), arr_test[i].ToString()));

}

return items.ToArray();

}

3. Now, I build and deploy WSP file to the SharePoint server in my dev box. Deployment is OK. The web part is also available on the sharepoint page. I have checked the file AutoCompleteWebService.asmx indeeds locates at ../12/ TEMPLATE/LAYOUTS/AutoCompleteWebService.asmx.

Now, I enter “a” to the text box, a list of “undefined” appears (all the items are “undefined”). If everything worked, “ab” should be displayed as I have “ab” item in the ArrayList (see the code above).

4. If I place the AutoCompleteExtender to a normal ASP.NET app and the web service asmx file exactly has the same code as above, it works and “ab” is shown.

So, what things go wrong in the SharePoint web part?

If you know what problem is, could you make comment about it? Thanks.

New Post: Loading External RSS with XmlWebPart

daniellarson — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:19:09 GMT

Yes! We actually use the SharePoiont Ajax Toolkit, and specifically the Ajax XmlWebPart, for our commercial product "NewsGator Social Sites" (of which RSS aggregation is only a minor functionality).

An IMPORTANT thing for you to realize is that you MUST handle data cleansing on the server. Otherwise your AJAX code can be opening up all sorts of XSS and other scripting attacks. The NewsGator backend server handles this for us, and outputs server-aggregated data that is then loaded and rendered from the client.

Have you loked into using the NewsGator server for this? I'd recommend it, there's a lot of engineering our team put into it to make aggregation really easy. Otherwise, I'd recommend a server side approach for the aggregation itself since you NEED to scrub that content. Keep in mind that most SharEPoint environments MAY be runing as "trusted sites" in IE (not necessarily best, but possible), so you don't want your users to trust unfiltered external content with the same trust as native sharepoint coontent. MS has an AntiXSS library that you may want to check out, which is also on Codeplex.

New Post: Loading External RSS with XmlWebPart

nickdelrosario — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:19:29 GMT

I see, this is similar to how NewsGator implements its RSS aggregate feeds? Does the handler approach have any performance hits to it?

We are looking for a way to possibly use just Ajax so that the xml retrieval and aggregation/transformation are all done in the client side, would this be possible in Ajax? The RSS Aggregator will be on the home page of our site and might contain a large number of feeds to aggregate per user thus the approach to just have it all done client side.

New Post: Loading External RSS with XmlWebPart

daniellarson — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:56:30 GMT

YES! You'll need to load a local URL. So write an HTTP handler proxy for whatever content you're getting-- but you are ALSO responsible for security when you do that, so be sure to sanitize any content to prevent malicious code such as XSS attacks.

New Post: Loading External RSS with XmlWebPart

nickdelrosario — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:18:55 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to load an external RSS file for testing purposes with the default Xml Web Part but the webpart just shows the a continuous loading image. Is there something I am missing out?

I am also looking into creating a Ajax enabled SharePoint RSS Aggregator, would extending the xml web part be a good starting point?

Regards,

Nick

New Post: Creating Sharepoint Web Parts that use the Ajax Control Toolkit

santoshpatil — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:24:27 GMT

hi Blake,

can you pls share the code of the Ajax Autocomplete thing

New Post: xsl:include failing in IE and Chrome

kliemohn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:44:52 GMT

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the pointers and for providing the framework. It is working quite well for us.

I think we'll just use the copy/paste approach for now. We already have multiple XmlControls per web part which is helping vastly with keeping our XSLT and the rest of our logic simple. This is just one case where I didn't want to break it up further but had a good bit of XSL that was common between two XmlControls (which happen to be in separate web parts).

I like your idea for a server side handler, but that is overkill for us now. It pains me to use the copy/paste approach, but the pragmatic side of me knows that there are times when this is appropriate.

Thanks,

Kirk Liemohn

New Post: xsl:include failing in IE and Chrome

daniellarson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:14:45 GMT

Hey Kliemohn

I'm glad you're using the toolkit succesfully! :) As a limitation of the browser technology, which forces you to use a lowest common denominator approach, I would advise you to NOT use <xsl:include> or <xsl:import> in the client. These aren't supported in all of the standard client runtime XML libraries. At least, we were not able to get them to work in all the browsers. :)

What we do instead is process these in a server side handler if needed. Call a handler that processes the includes and combines them into one xslt output. My advise: keep the XSLT as simple as possible. :) And try not to create an XSLT per webpart, but instead define views on data schemas. For example, lists of users can be defined as a data schema, and you may have several views defined on that class of data (simple, expanded, etc.).

There's some additional js methods on the XmlComponent such as OnClientLoad that you can pass from the web part property to the javascript. Let me know if you need any pointers, and be sure to use the latest source code!

New Post: xsl:include failing in IE and Chrome

kliemohn — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:02:00 GMT

We are using this SharePoint AJAX Toolkit and I am trying to simplify some of my web parts which use portions of XSL that is identical. So, I figured I would use the <xsl:include> or <xsl:import> statement.

What I have found is that the client-side xsl transformer for IE7, IE8 and Chrome3 don't seem to handle this. Firefox has no problem.

I originally thought I saw (through Fiddler) that the request for the XSL was denied with a 401 and that the browser xsl transformer was not going through the NTLM handshake process as it was for everything else. However, I haven't seen any requests at all for my included file within Fiddler when using IE lately so now I am second guessing myself.

Does anyone else have success or horrer stories with xsl:include or xsl:import?

I am currently hard-coding my xsl:include URL to keep things simple, but realize that I may want to make that depending on the SharePoint URL.

New Post: Getting up and running?

henrikfromsweden — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:17:28 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for the info. I´ll do some more testing later and post back if there are more questions ( most certainly it will be :) )

// Henrik

New Post: Getting up and running?

daniellarson — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:37:30 GMT

Henrik,

The main point of the library is the XmlComponent, which is wrapped in the XmlWebPart.

To use this web part, specify an XML url and an XSLT url. Sample URLs are provided in the XmlWebPart. You can set a refresh interval if you like, so the web part refreshes live data every so often.

You can inhert from this class to build your own custom web parts to programatically set the xml and xslt urls and add javascript, or you can just configure them in the part. The "main" development effort is building XML endpoints (http handlers work nicely in sharepoint 2007) and then simple XSLT to render it.

>> I wonder how to hook up client-side events on a textbox (input element) to call code deployed on the server?

If you rendered inputs in XSLT, you would use JavaScript to wire up events that call your (JavaScript) class library, which would call into ajax-enabled web services (asmx/wcf/simmle web handlers).

The library focuses on this simple principle: load data on the client, and render data on the client. From there, you can add to it for your own needs. The AjaxWebPArt is just a VERY slim base class-- the real base class you want to use for this will be the XmlWebPart.

New Post: Getting up and running?

henrikfromsweden — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:31:54 GMT

Hi Daniel,

Adding the verb attribute was the thing missing. Althought I didn´t have the web application feature in Central Admin, so something was missing there.

So now the ajax webpart works as expected but is there any more code samples to look at? I wonder how to hook up client-side events on a textbox (input element) to call code deployed on the server?

Thanks for the fast response on my first question.

Regards,

// Henrik

New Post: Getting up and running?

daniellarson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:16:54 GMT

Hey Henrick!

Thanks for trying this out. Once you get it running, I believe you'll love it. The error you're seeing is that scriptresource.axd, which serves the Microsoft AJAX runtime, is not registered as a handler.

Try applying the web application feature that the config project installs. That should write the web.config modification that you need. Note that you do need the 3.5 SP1 .net framework installed.

Otherwise, you can just enter the following httpHandler entry manualy (or through code). In my current production code I no longer use this config project, just the main project, and I register the web.config modification in my own code.

>> although I get the impression that it also deploys to the local bin folder?).

.PDB files (debug symbols) are installed in the bin folder, and SafeControls in the web.config. I did move to GAC deployment to support client code activation in feature receivers.

New Post: Getting up and running?

henrikfromsweden — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:13:51 GMT

Hi,

I downloaded the latest source code, compiled it and tried to deploy the two solutions (config first and SharePoint Ajax as second). The first thing i had to do was to add -allowgacdeployment to "SharePoint.AJAX.deploy.cmd", it seems like the project needs to deploy assemblies to the GAC (although I get the impression that it also deploys to the local bin folder?). The features looks ok in teh 12 HIVE and the js files are deployed to the folder "layouts/SHarePoint.Ajax"

I can add the XML web part but I don´t get past the animated loading gif, I have changed the "XML Path" to a RSS feed from a list in the same site.

What else can I check to get the web part to display?

Regards,

// Henrik

New Post: Browser caching

daniellarson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:29:18 GMT

Sweet- I'm glad you found that! Yeah, you HAVE to set something on the server to keep the client from caching.

As an alternative, you can always change the URL by appending a query string. We do that at NewsGator for each build, so a cached version of AJAX data is not used with a newer release (where the data may be incomplete or invalid).

Also-- I do recommend getting the SOURCE CODE and using that, as sometimes my "Releases" are out of date. I did make some considerable enhancements to the XmlComponent since the code you're referencing. :)

New Post: Browser caching

ericmbowden — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:16:40 GMT

The answer is on pg 71 of Daniel's book (Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform) suggesting that the following code needs to be included in the server side response. The Tip on the following page sums it up... if you do not explicitly expire the reponse, the browser might cache the data indefinitely, depending on the browser's cache settings.

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddYears(-1));

Perhaps there is still a webrequest header or other setting I can modify in client side to force a refresh, but this worked since I have control over the web service I'm calling.

btw, I did upgrade to the latest build (52849) from the older v3.0.2 release build I had been using without any issues.

All is well.

Thanks,

Eric