jbmurphy.com

I wanted to have a form that a person would submit (for an example a request of some type) and then it would be approved by the appropriate people. I find the built in workflow functionality too limiting and too difficult for users, so this is what I came up with:

I would have one list that contained fields for both the user to enter data and for each approver to approve or disapprove. In addition, there would be a “Final Approval” field that cold only be set once everyone approved or disapproved and an “I agree” to terms checkbox.

First up, I hid all the fileds on the NewForm.aspx that were related to the approval process. Just the data that was to be collected was shown. I did this with jquery and a CEWP:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
$('tr:has(select[title="User 1"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title="User 2"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title="User 3"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title="User 4"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title="User 5"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title="Final Status"])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('nobr:contains("User 1 Comments")').closest('tr').hide();
$('nobr:contains("User 2 Comments")').closest('tr').hide();
$('nobr:contains("User 3 Comments")').closest('tr').hide();
$('nobr:contains("User 4 Comments")').closest('tr').hide();
$('nobr:contains("User 5 Comments")').closest('tr').hide();
});
</script>

Once this is submitted by the user, and email is sent by a SharePoint workflow (I still don’t like them) telling the approvers to look at the request and approve it (link to the edit page in the email)

Then on the edit page, I used the jquery below to hide the “I agree” so the user could not go back and change it. Also I hid the final approval until all drop downs (Approvals) have changed from “Pending” to Approved or Declined. Obviously there would be security issues, but this is a small use case and we weren’t worried about malicious users (famous last words) – people were on their honor.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
$('tr:has(select[title=IAgree])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
$('tr:has(select[title=IAgree])').not('tr:has(tr)').append('<tr><td nowrap="true" valign="top" width="190px" class="ms-formlabel"><H3 class="ms-standardheader">I Agree</H3></TD><td valign="top" class="ms-formbody" width="400px">'+$('select[title=IAgree] :selected').text()+'</td></tr>');

$('select :selected').each(function(){
if($(this).text() == "Pending") {
$('tr:has(select[title=Final Status])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();
}
});

});
</script

Long title, but I wanted to get across what I was trying to do. If I had and XML file in a document library (you could mail enable the doc lib, and send XML from a query in SQL server using the “FOR XML” statement!), could I use jquery to add Autocomplete values to an input field in a newform.aspx? Ended up being not that difficult.

1. Once the ajax call sucessfully retrievs the xml file, the parseXml routine is called.
2. Seems there is an issue that IE will not think the file is XML, but rather as txt, so there some quick code to load the file as XML
3. Then I just look in the file and grab the values I want, and append them to an array
4. Then just set the array to be used as the autocomplete source

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$.ajax({ 	
	type: "GET",
	url: "http://URL/To/xmlfile.xml",
	dataType: ($.browser.msie) ? "text" : "xml",
	success: parseXml
});
});
function parseXml(data)
{
    var xml;
     if (typeof data == "string") {
       xml = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
       xml.async = false;
       xml.loadXML(data);
     } else {
       xml = data;
     };
 	var results = []; 
	$(xml).find("ID").each(function(){  
		var ClientName = $.trim($(this).find('Name').text());
		var ClientCode = $.trim($(this).find('ZipCode').text());
		results[results.length] = ClientName + "(" + ClientCode + ")"
	});

	$('input[title=Title]').autocomplete({
	source: results,
	delay:10,
	minLength: 3
	});
};
</script>