Month: August 2013

jQuery OuterHTML

theChrisKent jQuery , , , ,
Applies To: jQuery 1.0+

Often in debugging I’d like to pull back the full HTML for an object and take a look at it. The html() method is great for a lot of things, but it’s limited to just the inner HTML and often doesn’t contain the stuff I’m looking for. So here’s a helper function I wrote that gives you back the full HTML as a string:

function fullHTML(jQueryElem) {
	var fullH = jQueryElem.wrap('<div>').parent().html();
	jQueryElem.unwrap();
	return fullH;
}

All it does is perform a temporary wrap around whatever jQuery Element you pass in, grab it’s parent (which is now the Div we just wrapped it in) and grab the parent’s inner HTML (which is of course the full HTML of our object). Then we just unwrap it in line 3 and return the string in line 4.

You can call it like this (this code just writes it out to the console):

console.log(fullHTML($('#myobjectID')));

It’s quick and easy and I use it in development all the time. Hopefully it helps you too.

Use SPServices in Nintex Forms 2010

theChrisKent jQuery, Nintex, Nintex Forms, SharePoint , , , , , ,
Applies to: SharePoint 2010, SPServices, Nintex Forms 2010

Marc D Anderson’s SPServices (jQuery for SharePoint Web Services) can save you a ton of time and make your SharePoint sites more responsive and dynamic with very little effort. Nintex can really beef up your workflows and/or your forms. So it makes a lot of sense to bring these together!

Recently I was tasked with pulling some user profile information to display on a Nintex Form that was being used to launch a site workflow. Unfortunately, there is no way to run workflow code before showing the initial form; so all of those great Nintex Workflow Actions were unavailable to me. Fortunately, SPServices allows easy querying of the User Profile Service directly from client side script.

Nintex Forms uses a copy of the jQuery library that you can access through NWF$. So just adding SPServices to your form’s page won’t work, but since jQuery is already there it’s fairly simple to get it all hooked up.

The first thing to do is to get the appropriate version of SPServices. The version of SPServices you use depends on the version of jQuery in use. To figure out what version of jQuery Nintex Forms is using you’ll need to temporarily add some custom JavaScript to your form.

To add JavaScript to Nintex Forms, from the Form editor click the Settings button in the Ribbon and then expand the Custom JavaScript section at the bottom:

FormJavascript

You can take advantage of NWF$ here. Simply add the following to the box and click Save:

console.log(NWF$().jquery);

Open the F12 Developer tools and preview your form. In the Console you should see the version of jQuery being used by Nintex Forms. For us it was 1.6.1. So we should be fine using the latest version of SPServices.

You’ll need to download the SPServices library. Since SPServices uses an IIFE to extend the jQuery object, we’ll need to make a slight adjustment to instead extend the NWF$ object. This is actually really easy. Open up the minified version of SPServices (the one with the .min at the end of the file name) and go all the way to the very end where you’ll see (jQuery);

Just replace the jQuery portion with NWF$ and save with a different name (maybe put an NF.min.js on the end). It’ll look something like this:

SPServicesCode

Then just upload it somewhere in your site collection (The Style Library is generally the best place).

To reference that file go back to the Nintex Form editor and click that Settings button again and expand the Advanced section. Scroll down to the Custom JavaScript Includes section and add the address of the script you just uploaded (If you have multiple JavaScript Includes you just put one on each line):

SPServicesInclude

Press Save and that’s it! You can now access SPServices to do whatever fancy magic you need!

To make sure it worked, scroll back down to that Custom JavaScript section of the Form Settings dialog and add the following code:

NWF$(document).ready(function(){
     console.log(NWF$().SPServices.Version());
});

Then just make sure those F12 developer tools are open and preview the form again. You’ll see the version of SPServices logged out to the console.