Customization

Using SharePoint's Rich Text Box in a page

shehan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:17:48 GMT

ASP.Net does not provide a rich text box control in its set of web controls. So, if you need to place a rich text box on your SharePoint page you'll have to use a commercial, free or open source text box control (and there are plenty out there). However if you don't want to introduce another dependency, in the form of an external control, you can use SharePoint's built-in rich text box.

If you're creating a page layout that binds to a content types field then its straight forward and you can use RichTextField class. However, if you want to display a textbox that does not interact with a content type then you can use the InputFormTextBox and configure its properties so it render as a rich text box.

Here is an example:

<SharePoint:InputFormTextBox runat="server" ID="RichTextBox" ValidationGroup="CreateCase" Rows="8" Columns="40" RichText="true" RichTextMode="Compatible" AllowHyperlink="true" TextMode="MultiLine" />

Note: change the RichTextMode value to 'FullHtml' to render more html icons in text box's tool bar.

Technorati Tags: Rich text box,asp.net

Change the format of the 'Created By' field in a page layout

shehan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:13:26 GMT

I was creating a custom page layout for a publishing site and one of the requirements was to display the 'Created By' field. Piece of cake, I thought, all I need to do was to all add the following:

<SharePointWebControls:TextField FieldName="Created_x0020_By" runat="server"/>

However, this resulted in the field being rendered in the format- 'domain\username'. But on the 'View Properties' (DispForm.aspx) for the page the Created By field shown at the bottom of the page is in the correct format -'FirstName LastName'.

After some experimenting and researching this is the tag I had to use to get the correct format:

<SharePoint:FormField ID="FormField1" ControlMode="Display" FieldName="Author" DisableInputFieldLabel="true" runat="server"/>

Note: the 'SharePoint' tag prefix for the above maps to:

<%@Register TagPrefix="SharePoint" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls"%>

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Created By,Page Layout