Content types missing in Site Pages library "New" dropdown, and not able to create pages

Symptoms

User goes to site pages, clicks the "new" button and only sees "link" and "folder"

Library settings show the site page content type or other content types that were added to the library.

User can still create pages if they go to an existing page and use the new button there, but once a page gets created there is no way to change its content type.

Solution

As a global 365 admin, go to the sharepoing admin site, click Settings > Pages > and then "Allow users to create new modern pages"

 Notes

This should also be a warning for admins who turn this off - it does not actually prevent users from creating modern pages - I was still able to do so using both the "new" button in a page and also using powershell.

Copying sharepoint multi user field values from one item to another in powerapps

'Target Field Name':ForAll(varSourceItem.'Source Field Name',{

                    '@odata.type': "#Microsoft.Azure.Connectors.SharePoint.SPListExpandedUser",

                    Claims: Claims,

                    Department: Department,

                    DisplayName: DisplayName,

                    Email: Email,

                    JobTitle: JobTitle,

                    Picture: Picture

                })

Mass-changing powerapps controls settings

One of the most annoying powerapps restrictions is when you add a form (edit or view), all cards exist independently from each other and there is no way to "theme" them to look the same. 

So if I have an application with lots of forms and I want to have all the labels be a specific font, font size and weight, I have to do it on each label, in each form....uggghh!

The solution I came up with is:

1. Install VSCode and the powerapps extension in vscode (Power Apps Guide - Code - The new easier way to pack and unpack canvas app source code - Power Apps Guide - Blog)
2. download your app, and extract it using the extension (see link above for detailed instructions):
   pac canvas unpack --msapp .\myapp.msapp --sources .\myapp\
3. Decide on a single label that will be your master label, or a variable name that will contain your defaults. we will need the name of that label or the variable for later - lets call it XYZ for now.
4. open the app folder in vs code, and do a find and replace with the following settings:

In the find box, turn on reg ex and type:

^(\s*DataCardKey.*As label:)

this will find all lines that start with "DataCardKey" and end with "As label:".

By default these are the lines that microsoft powerapps will add to the code when adding a data card. This is the definition of the header (label) of the data card.

In the replace box, type:

$1

                    FontWeight: =XYZ.FontWeight

                    Color: =XYZ.Color

This will add to all instances of the "datacardkey?? as label:" the fontweight and color (in this example) to copy from your "master" label. Alternatively you can create app wide variables for the weight\color or other properties.

You will probably need to fix some problems that the vscode will highlight.

Next, re-pack the app:
pac canvas pack --sources .\ --msapp c:\code\myapp.msapp

Then upload it to a new canvas app (or override the existing one)

Create a canvas app, click "file">"open".

Now if you change the properties you configured on the master label, everything else will flow.

Making the workbench full width

I often am frustrated by the forced max width of the workbench - which inhibits my web part testing. To overcome this, I add the following in the componentDidMount of my web part during development phase:

$("#workbenchPageContent").attr("style","max-width:inherit");

Getting user ID by email in REACT SPFX web part

Missed me? I'm back!

Here is a small function I whipped up for React web parts that need the user id.

 /**

     * Fetches the user ID for the specified user

     * @param email the email for the user

     * @returns a promise containing the user ID in the site collection

     * example:

     * var userID = await this.getUserIDByEmail(this.props.wpContext.pageContext.user.email);

     */

    private async getUserIDByEmail(email:string):Promise<number>

    {

        var url = `${this.props.wpContext.pageContext.site.absoluteUrl}/_api/web/siteusers?$filter=Email eq '${email}'`;

        var userData:any = await  Query.GetQueryData(this.props.wpContext,url);

        return userData.value[0].Id;

    }

this refers to a class I created called Query where I put some code to help me do queries:

export default class Query {

  public static async GetQueryData(context: WebPartContext, url: string) {

    var deferred = $.Deferred();

    console.log(`running query '${url}'`);

    let _nometaOpt: ISPHttpClientOptions = {

      headers: { 'Accept': 'application/json;odata=nometadata', 'odata-version': '', 'Content-type': 'application/json;odata=verbose' }

    };

    context.spHttpClient.get(url, SPHttpClient.configurations.v1, _nometaOpt).then(

      (response: SPHttpClientResponse) => {

        if (response.status == 200) {

          console.log("got query results");

          if (response.headers.get("content-type").indexOf("atom") > -1) {

            console.log("Got xml instead of json on " + url);

            response.text().then((text:string) => {

              deferred.resolve(text);

            });

          }

          else {

            response.json().then((jsondata: JSON) => {

              deferred.resolve(jsondata);

            });

          }

        }

        else {

          console.log("error getting query results!");

          console.log(response.status);

        }

      }, (err: any) => {

        debugger;

        console.log("error getting query results!");

        console.log(err);

      });

    return deferred;

  }

}

Restricting a User Picker field to only selecting SharePoint groups

 After a lot of research, I couldn't find the answer, so I wrote one myself.
To change a person field in sharepoint that is configured to allow "users and groups" to only allow groups, you need to inject code that changes the picker settings after the page is loaded.

Code below:

$(document).ready(function(){

//wait for the initialisation of the sharepoint script 

  SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', function(){

//call our special function with the field's internal name

    SetGroupOnly("myfieldinternalname");

  });

});

function SetGroupOnly(fieldName)

{

//make sure there is a control for that field on the page

  if($("div[id^='"+fieldName+"_']").length>0)

  {

    //wait for the initialisation of the control to finish

    WaitForControl("div[id^='"+fieldName+"_'][id$='$ClientPeoplePicker']", function(){

//get the people picker control object

      var peoplepicker = SPClientPeoplePicker.SPClientPeoplePickerDict[$("div[id^='"+fieldName+"_'][id$='$ClientPeoplePicker']").attr("id")];

//set the type to SPGroup

      peoplepicker.PrincipalAccountType = "SPGroup";

      peoplepicker.PrincipalAccountTypeEnum = 8;

      peoplepicker.ResolvePrincipalSource = 15;

      peoplepicker.SearchPrincipalSource = 15;

    });

  }

}

function WaitForControl(controlSelector, returnFunction)

{

  if($(controlSelector).length>0)

    returnFunction();

  else

    setTimeout(function(){

      WaitForControl(controlSelector,returnFunction)},50);    

}

User is in SharePoint Group but doesn't get permissions

Found this today - a user shows up in a SharePoint group, but when you do a permission check the user doesnt have permissions to resources in sharepoint that the group has permissions to.
One explanation to this that I found is when the user was added to the group using the API (REST, JSOM, CSOM) by specifying the user's login name (domain\username). Turns out that adds the user to the group, but not the correct user....so it looks right, but it isn't. what is the correct user? you have to add the claims token "i:0#.w|" before the domain\username to properly add the user.
This off course applies to the code that adds the users. As far as I can tell you will have to remove the incorrect users, and then add them again either manually or using code.

When Cumulative doesn't mean Cumulative

 So, I just tried adding a new server to a farm, after patching it to the same level as all other servers in the farm (April 2017 CU).
Surprisingly, the SharePoint configuration wizard told me off, saying the server is missing the December 2016 CU.

Yes, that is right - the April 2017 CU does not include the CU that was released 5 months before it...Cumulative? nope!

Taxonomy field value doesnt set

We had a puzzle today, which we were sure was an issue with the document property parser in SharePoint. Every time we tried to set the value of a specific column using either our existing powershell script or an event handler that works on every other library in the system, the document would be updated with the property value, but after a second we'd refresh the page and see the value went back to null.

It was frustrating! I was sure it was because the document had an empty value in the document properties that was overriding the value from my code - despite the fact that my code is implemented with a delay to ensure it runs after the parser.

We troubleshooted several ways and couldn't find the solution...until we noticed something weird when we were looking at the content type schema - the taxonomy field was set to support multiple values! our code was specifically written for that field, which is not supposed to support multiple values. Some nasty little elf went into the column setting in the library and changed my precious from its normal settings. Setting it back and everything went to normal.

Moral of the story - since setting a taxonomy field's value in code is different if the field supports multivalue or not, make sure either your code is robust enough to handle a nasty user making a change, or tell your users to keep their hands to themselves!

Creating links to documents inside document sets - BUG

This is a bug a client of mine found in SharePoint 2010, and I verified on 2013 and Office 365 (as of today - not yet fixed).

The issue is when you create a link to a document inside a document set. If you are not familiar with this - users can create links inside document libraries, using a content type called "Link To Document". You can also create document sets - which is a special type of folder. To do so, add the two content types to a document library:




You then also have to configure the document set content type to accept links to documents in the document set settings under the content type settings:

The problem is when you create a document set, and in it you then create a link to document:

The result is that the users get redirected to the wrong URL, and instead of seeing the actual document set they started from, with the new link (or any document that is already in the document set) the users see a default view of a generic document set - not the one they started from:

The reason for this is different in 2010 and 2013. I have yet to pinpoint the reason for the issue in 2013, but in 2010 the issue is that the URL when creating a new link to document has two "RootFolder" parameters, and that confuses the server when the users click "OK" to save the link and to get redirected back. Instead of seeing the document set, they see the default document set home page - with no parameter to tell the server which document set to actually display the contents of.

I have created a workaround for 2010, and am yet to modify it for 2013 (since the behaviour in 2013 is slightly different, though the results are the same). The workaround is to use javascript to detect if we got to the current page from the edit form, and if the current page is a document set home page and if the current page parameters have two question marks in them. If so, redirect the user, removing the second "&RootFolder=" parameter. This will not work in 2013 since the url there doesnt have parameters after creating the link to document.

Here is an example of the code. To inject it I used a farm level feature that added a ScriptLink to all pages in the farm. The script link was to a .js file that contained the following code:

function FixDocumentSetRedirect() {
    if (document.referrer.indexOf("EditForm.aspx") > 0 && document.location.href.toLowerCase().indexOf("docsethomepage.aspx?id=") > 0 && document.location.href.toLowerCase().indexOf("docsethomepage.aspx?id=") < document.location.href.indexOf("?")) {
        var source = document.referrer;
        source = source.substring(source.indexOf("Source=") + "Source=".length);
        var firstRootFolder = source.indexOf("&RootFolder=");
        var secondRootFolder = source.indexOf("&RootFolder=", firstRootFolder + 1);
        if (secondRootFolder > firstRootFolder) {
            source = source.substring(0, secondRootFolder);
        }
        alert(source);
        
        document.location.href = source;
    }
}

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("FixDocumentSetRedirect");