Presentation

The presence awareness of SharePoint depends on a couple different pieces of technology all working together, namely:

• SharePoint
• Exchange
• Lync
• Active Directory

Once you have them all wired up and images are showing correctly, you should begin to see them on the people search results page. This is Ruby’s search result showing that she is currently online.

If I hover over her image I can look at her contact card. From the contact card I can initiate a chat, phone call, video conference or email her.

Business Case

So what if you’d like to add this capability to a display template that you are building? For example you want to search a customer database and in that database you have references to your sales people. If you have a valid SIP address (often the users email address) you can build presence into your display template.

Build It

I previously posted about creating Display Templates. I will not cover every step, just those needed to add this ability. In order for all this to work you need some data. The main element is a valid SIP address (I know I am repeating myself, buy this really is the key to making it all work.) If you look at the preceding images you will see that I have a bunch of data about the customer, but I also have the data about the Sales Person, in this case Ruby. For this to work you need:

• The User’s Name
• The User’s Email Address
• The User’s SIP Address
• Optionally, you need the Picture URL, but it depends on what you want to show

1. Add the following variables to the top of your display template. Notice that I am calling the Context Current Item to get my variables. This is really the hardest part.

var userPersonaId = $htmlEncode(id) + "_peopleUserPersona";
var uSip = ctx.CurrentItem.DHTSalesPersonEmail;
var uEmail = ctx.CurrentItem.DHTSalesPersonEmail;
var uName = ctx.CurrentItem.DHTSalesPerson;
var uPicUrl = null;

2. Now you need to decide where you want the presence icon to be presented. Add the following div tag in that location. My syntax highlighter is not working on HTML…

3. Finally insert the following code near the bottom of your template. This code registers a callback to load the script and display the presence icon for you. There are a couple different display options available, this one presents the simplest, a presence icon without a picture.

AddPostRenderCallback(ctx, function(){
	EnsureScriptFunc("clienttemplates.js", "RenderUserFieldWorker", function() {
		var getUserPersona = function() {
			var renderCtx = new ContextInfo();
			renderCtx.Templates = {};
			renderCtx.Templates["Fields"] = {};
			var fieldSchemaData = { "DefaultRender":"1", "PictureSize": "None"};
			var listSchema = {"EffectivePresenceEnabled": "1", "PresenceAlt": Srch.Res.item_People_NoPresenceAvailable};
			var userData = {"title": uName, "email": uEmail, "picture": uPicUrl, "sip": uSip};
			var personaControlElement = document.getElementById(userPersonaId);
			if (!Srch.U.n(personaControlElement))
			{
				personaControlElement.innerHTML = RenderUserFieldWorker(renderCtx, fieldSchemaData, userData, listSchema);
			}
			if(typeof(ctx.EnqueueImnRequest) == "undefined") { ctx.EnqueueImnRequest = false; }
			if (ctx.EnqueueImnRequest == false) {
				ctx.ClientControl.add_oneTimeResultRendered(function(){ if (typeof(ProcessImn) != "undefined") { ProcessImn(); } });
				ctx.EnqueueImnRequest = true;
			}
		};
		getUserPersona();
	});
});

4. Test your page by running a query and evaluating the results. In my case it looks like this.

Display Options

You have a couple options for the picture. If you provide a URL SharePoint will render that image. If you set the uPicUrl to null SharePoint will go get it for you as long as you don’t have cross domain issues. If you do have cross domain issues, like your My Site Host is on a different Web Application, then you have to tell your template that it’s OK. Do this with the following code.

_spPageContextInfo.crossDomainPhotosEnabled = true;

I have not enumerated every possible display option, but here are a couple that I have found. You can change the options through two parameters fieldSchemaData and listSchema. The picture size essentially maps to the user profile small, medium and large thumbnails.

fieldSchemaData	Purpose	Values	Output
PictureSize	Size of picture to be presented	None, Size_72px, Size_48px, Size_36px	Size_72px
DefaultRender	Use default rendering	1	PictureSize “None”
WithPictureDetail	Show picture and name	1
PictureOnly	Show only the picture	1
PresenceOnly	Only show presence	1

You can add more to the userData object to, like jobTitle and department then the WithPictureDetail option shows a bit more detail.

Conclusion

There are MANY options and combinations that will allow you to create a pleasing UI. Play with it and let me know what you think! Here’s the file I used for this demo.

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• Display templates are HTML and JavaScript rather than XSL
• Display templates are configured for the Site and Site Collection rather than for a Web part
• Display templates are applied with rules and logic
• Display templates are applied to individual result items, not the entire result set
• Display Templates are used for Results of all kinds, search results, content by search results, and refiners
• …and the list goes on

In this post I’ll show you the basics of creating a Display Template and then future posts will focus on the cool stuff you can do once you know these basics. I will assume that you are using a Search Site Collection. If you aren’t then you will have to tailor your changes accordingly. I also assume that you know how to deal with Crawled and Managed Properties. I have written about this for 2010 and it’s not too terribly different in 2013, in fact you can do it from the Site Collection now!

The Business

You have to have a reason to change the look of your results. In my case I have added a property to the User Profile called Twitter User Name. This way, users can opt in to showing off their social connection to Twitter. The HR department wants to increase social engagement in the company so they have asked my SharePoint team (me) to add the Twitter link to their People Search result. They would like it to link to the users Twitter profile page. So here we go:

The Basics

1. From the Search Center navigate to Site Settings. In the Look and Feel section chose Design Manager.
2. In Design Manager choose Upload Design Files.
3. Click the link at the top of the page to open the Master Page Gallery in Windows Explorer.
4. Browse down the folder structure to Display Templates/Search/ and locate the Item_Person.html file. This is the file used for the out of the box People Search result. Notice that there are actually two files named Item_Person. We always work with the HTML file leaving SharePoint to manage the JavaScript file.
5. Copy the Person_Item file to your desktop and rename it to Item_Twitter_Person (this way when we copy it back it won’t overwrite the original file.)
6. Now open the file in a text editor and find the title tag. Change the title to Twitter People Item.
7. In the next section are a bunch of tags that begin with <mso. These control the metadata for the Display Template. The one we’re interested in is the ManagedPropertyMapping tag. We need to add any new custom properties to this tag before we can display that property in the page. This is where you have to decide what Managed Properties from the Search Service you are going to use in your page. In my case the fine IT folks told me it was called TwitterAccountName. So I’ll add that to the end of the line. Pay attention to the syntax here. (In a later post I’ll discuss more about the syntax of this declaration. For now just duplicate the field name.)
8. Now we need to add the field to the display part of the page. If I were to create a link to Twitter for my own account it would look like this: Twitter: <div><a href=”http://twitter.com/MatthewMcD”>MatthewMcD</a></div> What I need to do is swap out my account with a token that will be replaced by the user in the search results. Microsoft introduced a new token that we will use for this purpose _#= to start and =#_ to end. That combination of characters will tell SharePoint to look at what’s in between and treat it like JavaScript. So what we need now is a way to reference our field TwitterAccountName. We do that by referencing the Context of the Current Item in the search results. All put together it looks like this: _#= ctx.CurrentItem.TwitterAccountName =#_. So now our code looks like this inserted below the NameValue div:
9. Save the file and copy it back to the server by dragging it back to the Search Display Templates folder where you started. If you refresh the Explorer windows you will notice that SharePoint automatically created a matching .js file.
10. Now we need to tell SharePoint when to use our new Display Template. We do this with a Result Type. Return to Site Settings and choose Search Result Types from the Site Collection Administration section.
11. Locate the Person result type, hover click and choose Copy.
12. Change the name to Twitter Person and change the Action | What should these results look like? to Twitter People Item. Notice how the Display Template URL changes to the JavaScript sister file SharePoint created.
13. Click Save and return to the Search Center to check your work.
14. Execute a search on the People Search vertical and you should see the results of your work.
15. So we achieved our goal, but there’s something I don’t like about the result. Oso does not have a Twitter account, so we should not show the “Twitter:” text. This is a simple change and demonstrates the last basic concept for the article.
16. You can open and edit the Display Template right our of the Explorer window. Then each time you save the file it will update on the server immediately. So, go ahead, open the file in your text editor right out of SharePoint.
17. Now that you have the file open we need to add some conditional code so we only write the Twitter tag if the user entered a value. This is super easy. The trick is to tell SharePoint that it is a code block. For that I’ll use an HTML comment and our special tag again. This is what our code looks like now. I added my JavaScript in between the comments and wrapped it around my divs.
18. Return to the Search Center and test the search. You should see that the values only display when they are not blank.

Conclusion

So what have we learned?

• You can use a text editor to create Display Templates from copies of the out of the box files.
• You can embed and emit custom managed properties in your search results.
• You can run JavaScript in your Display Template for conditional formatting.

Download the file used in this sample: Item_Person_Twit.zip

What’s Next? Well, I think I am going to show you once and for all how to display the SharePoint presence icon and hover card in search results….next time!

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My Exchange 2013 Demo Issues

I started noticing Certificate errors in my demo when I opened Outlook (both 2010 and 2013).

Viewing the certificate I see that it is truly expired:

So just to be sure I visit my Exchange 2013 Server and start seeing a host of issues, all certificate related.

I’ll deal with one at a time. First the Exchange certificate.

Renewing a Self-signed Exchange 2013 Certificate

This has changed a bit since 2010. It has gotten a lot easier. You have to determine the certificate in question that is expiring and get it’s thumbprint. Just select the cert in the UI and click the edit pencil. Copy the Thumbprint to the clipboard.

Open the PowerShell console and issue the following command (where {thumbprint} is your unique thumbprint):

Get-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint {thumbprint} | New-ExchangeCertificate

You will have to confirm the action and the result should be a new Cert and Thumbprint. In my case it was set to the services IMAP, POP, and SMTP, but missed IIS. So I ran:

Enable-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint {thumbprint} -Services IIS

Finally, I felt the need to remove the expired certificate.

Remove-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint {thumbprint}

The result is sweet and far simpler than I expected.

Trust Issues

Opening Outlook I still had “Issues”. My root CA is also generated specifically for my demo and not from a trusted authority like Verisign, so I have to tell the machine to trust me.

I mentioned before that I am not a certificate expert. I am certain that there is a better resolution to this issue than what I am about to show you. But in my demo environment, this works. If you know the RIGHT way to ensure domain certificate trust, please let me know. I have Binged and Googled this to death and have not found a clean, always trust my root CA that works without expiration. Here is the fix, until the certificate expires again.

1. Click Install Certificate…
2. Click Next.
3. Chose Place Certificate in the following store and choose Browse.
4. In the Select Certificate Store dialog choose Show physical stores. Browse to Trusted Root Certification Authorities and expand and select Local Computer.

   

5. Click OK to close the dialog.
6. Click Next.
7. Click Finish.
8. Restart Outlook and everything should start normally.

These steps should also resolve the OWA and Exchange Admin Center browser certificate errors as well.

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Summary

When you build up a comprehensive demo environment like mine you have to consider the full lifecycle of all the components. In my case I run the following servers that must be maintained, patched and upgraded:

• Domain Controller
• SQL Server
• SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2013
• Office Web Apps 2013
• CRM
• Lync 2013
• Exchange 2013

I am by no means an expert in all these technologies, though I do know a bit about SharePoint. A post like this is to ensure that next year when I forget how to do this I have a resource to fall back on.

Final Note: After several Snapshots I ran into an issue with the Exchange Admin Center not registering the new certificate. I just dropped into IIS Manager and manually applied the new certificate (same cert that was already on OWA) and everything started working.

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How to Implement Search in SharePoint 2013

This half-day tutorial is intended to deliver a complete SharePoint Search education for beginner and intermediate SharePoint IT professionals. The course is targeted at SharePoint 2013 administrators who are attempting to provision, configure, manage and customize the SharePoint 2013 Search Service Application. This tutorial provides sufficient detail for the student to follow the demonstrations to complete a Search configuration and resolve issues with tested troubleshooting techniques. More Details Here…

SharePoint 2013 Search Back to Front

SharePoint 2013 introduces many exciting enhancements to the end user search experience. In this class, you will learn what the major changes are and how to apply them to your enterprise. We will explore new concepts for crawling and presenting content. Through many demonstrations, this class will show how to improve the search experience for your end users with SharePoint 2013. This class will allow you to:

• Learn about the changes in how the search engine is configured.
• Learn new techniques for presenting Search results.
• Understand how to promote special classes of content

If you sign up before May 31st you will save $500 off the registration, if you use the code MCDERMOTT you will save an additional $200. For those savings you could afford to bring a second person with you!!!!

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DEV207 Developing Social Applications in SharePoint 2013

I had a blast in this session. We covered the SharePoint Social API through REST, JSOM and the .Net CSOM. The code demos showed off the basics of using JSOM in a Display Template and sample GETs and POSTs in my “graphically rich UI”. I also showed off my newest demo, a Windows 8 App that grabs the social data from a REST call. I need a bit of time to polish it up, so if you would like the code let me know and I’ll send it to you in whatever shape it’s in.

Slides: Developing Social Apps McDermott

Code: Developing Social Apps Code

DEV209 Developers Approach to Search Applications

This was a brand new session for me, WOW what fun. I presented the “compiled code” version of this session last year. This year there is 80% less code! Stunning how great the new search features of SharePoint 2013 are that we can use the out of the box features to add value without sacrificing stability of the farm.

This is the article I was telling you about for the Graphical Slider: Using jQuery and jqplot in your display template to show a piechart refiner

Slides: Developers Approach to Search Applications

Code: I’ll clean up the sample and put it here soon. If you need it NOW, let me know in the comments.

IW416 Solving Enterprise Search Challenges with SharePoint

This session was a romp around the new features of SharePoint. The audience was nice to me when I screwed up my Query Rules demo. Though it was funny when I made Hank Wheeler disappear.

Slides: Solving Enterprise Search Challenges with SharePoint

In Closing

I cannot say “Thank You” enough for the generosity of the Combined Knowledge crew with Zoe and Steve in the lead. I am truly grateful to the attendees as well, without them there would be no one for me to show my dog pictures to! The audiences were wonderful.

Until next year, if you’ll have me back, Thanks!

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Solving Enterprise Search Challenges with SharePoint 2010

The goal here was to provide an overview of SharePoint Search as a solution to business problems.

• Search configuration overview
• Presenting Global Links to File Shares
• Rendering metadata in search results
• Creating a 360 degree view of your line-of-business data
• Creating actionable search results

This class is primarily for IT Pros, but can be for developers that want to know what can be done with Search out of the box. Here is the deck.

SharePoint Search Center Configuration

In this session I demonstrated how to achieve the different User Interfaces that I have been talking about. I also covered what is new and very cool about SharePoint 2013 Search UI and Query Rules.

• Search Center Branding for SharePoint 2010
• Changing the Search Center Look and Feel
• Presenting Actionable BCS Results
• Highlighting Specific Content
• Changes for SharePoint 2013 Search Results

This one was more for the devs and UI folks in the room. Here is the deck.

Share and Enjoy

I presented SharePoint Search Center Configuration where I compared the differences between working in SharePoint 2010 Search Center and SharePoint 2013. I covered the topics:

• Search Center Basics
• Result Types in SharePoint 2013
• Display Templates in SharePoint 2013
• Search Refinement Compared
• Promoting Content Compared

As always all of my demos and code are available if you like. Here are a few handy links from the end of the presentation:

• The code for my Result Type demo is available here: Item Person Social
• The walk through for creating the Result Type is here: SharePoint 2013 JSOM and Social API
• The walk through for creating the SharePoint 2010 Search Results Page is here:  Getting Started with Search Results

Finally, you can download the deck here: SharePoint Search Center Configuration – SA SPUG

…and if I get that one demo working I’ll post it here!

*I’m a SkyDrive Insider, ask me about SkyDrive or learn more about the SkyDrive Insiders program here.    

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Community and People

For the 7th time I was greeted by an email from Microsoft congratulating me as a SharePoint MVP. As each year draws to a close I can’t help but wonder if I have done enough to be renewed. I have to admit that I enjoy the MVP Community in general and specifically my great colleagues in the SharePoint MVP Community. The folks I communicate with daily on topics technical and organizational impress the hell out of me. I choose to do business with people I trust (and by extension who they trust) and this has made a huge impact in how well I sleep at night. I am a Director at Aptillon, Inc. I am in business to help people be better at what they do. The guys I work with at Aptillon are too. I also teach for Critical Path Training. Now you know why, they are great, talented, trustworthy folks who really care about quality delivery.

Upgrade and Improve

I love to teach. This goes directly to my passion to help people be better at what they do. Most of you know I teach SharePoint 2010 Administration for Critical Path Training.  I have been teaching that class for SharePoint 2010 for over 2 years, we’re now adding the upgraded class for SharePoint 2013. What’s new is that I’ve started teaching SharePoint Designer classes (officially titled: Creating No-Code SharePoint Designer Solutions for SharePoint 2010) If you have seen any of my Search presentations, you know I love working with the SharePoint User Interface customizing search center results and BCS Profiles. This class is a natural extension of my passion for creating great supportable solutions in SharePoint. The side benefit, that I can admit now, is I have learned a TON as I learned to teach this class.

Passion, Applied

Beyond SharePoint, I have several other passions. I wear these passions on my sleeve, which, I believe, is where your passions belong. My wife, Mary Jane, and I are dog people. We compete in Dog Agility and enjoy the sport, the people and the connection we forge with our “Golden Girl” Ruby. She has recently completed her novice titles in AKC Agility and we’ll be working on Open titles in 2013. Photography has long been a passion of mine since I first started shooting in 4th grade (somewhere there is an Super 8mm film of my take on Candid Camera). I spent much of my free time shooting or processing my film in a darkroom that I built in my parents house. In Junior High I purchased my first 35mm camera and in High School I received my first methodical instruction in the craft. I had an amazing instructor and to this day am grateful for his attention and constructive criticism. Fast forward to recent history and I have once again upgraded my gear. I was lucky to be offered a speaking engagement at TechEd Africa in 2011. This was an amazing opportunity to go “On Safari” and use my skills as a photographer. What I am learning now, is how to “Develop” my images after I finish the shoot. This is the part about “Upgrade and Passion” that I am eager to survive. We live in an amazing time where technology is not the only advancement, but you can learn literally ANYTHING in the comfort of your own home. In my case I am learning how process my photos to restore them to what my eye saw when I made the image.

I am taking on a few small projects to help challenge me, for example, my buddy Jimmy recently retired and took up his passion, lutherie. (Don’t worry, I didn’t know that was Guitar Making either.) I am shooting the production photos for his forthcoming site and helping him with managing his brochures. This has been a wonderful creative outlet for me. Mary Jane and I are also culling through the massive catalog of photos that I shot in Africa with the goal of picking a few of the best for framing. Relearning how to take a photo from concept to print in the digital age is pretty cool. I am relying heavily on Safari Books Online and Kelby Training. I discovered Scott Kelby’s books shortly after I got my camera. He decreased the learning curve for me and continues to educate and improve my techniques.

What’s Next

None of this means I am stepping back from SharePoint, quite the opposite. My travel plans for the first few months of 2013 so far include New Hampshire, London, Ireland and San Francisco (with a side trip to Sonoma and Monterey). I plan to use the SharePoint trips to support my desire to improve my photography (which I’ll post here as I go).

• SharePoint Designer No-Code Solutions, Portsmouth, NH January 14-17
• SharePoint 2010 Administrators Survival Camp, Herndon, VA (Washington, DC)
• SharePoint Saturday Austin, March 3
• SPTechCon, San Francisco, March 3-6 (Register with MCDERMOTT and save)
• Professional SharePoint 2010 for Administrators Webcast, Online
• SharePoint Evolutions Conference, London, April 15th-17th

I’ll keep teaching and learning and hope you do too! Happy New Year!

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JOSM and Social Methods

Calling Social with JOSM is done just like it is with other JSOM functions with a few new Social objects thrown in for added functionality:

1. Get a Client Context
2. Create a SP.Social.SocialFeedManager and supply various options.
3. Get the required feed from the FeedManager (we’ll target a user, but you can also get a Personal Feed or the public NewsFeed)
4. Load the Context and then call executeQueryAsync to fetch the results asynchronously.
5. Finally we process the results and perform data manipulations to create the presentation in the UI. As usual, this is the biggest section of the code.

The code samples that follow highlight the important sections of code. The samples are not complete. For the complete code sample download the code and review it.

Get the ClientContext

As it turns out, this was one of the most problematic sections. I had trouble getting the timing right in the search page to be certain that the ClientContext would load correctly. Here I demonstrate how I get the client context. Below, in Search Tricks, I demonstrate how to get the timing right and ensure that you are calling your function after all the JavaScript has loaded. This code snippet also demonstrates how I have been debugging my HoverPanel. Using IE and the Developer Tools, you can write to the Script debugger panel with the console.log method. This enables your code to run at full speed while debugging without getting in the way of the hover behavior.

// Initialize the current client context and the SocialFeedManager instance.
try
{
	console.log("Get Client Context...");
	clientContext = SP.ClientContext.get_current();
}
catch(err)
{
	console.log(err.message);
	return;
}

This is what the debugger looks like after a few successful runs:

Create the FeedManager with Options

Create the FeedManager by passing the ClientContext to the constructor of the SocialFeedManager. Then, optionally, set the necessary options for the results. In this case I only want 5 threads, but I could also change the sort order and other options.

feedManager = new SP.Social.SocialFeedManager(clientContext);
// Set parameters for the feed content that you want to retrieve.
var feedOptions = new SP.Social.SocialFeedOptions();
feedOptions.set_maxThreadCount(5); // default is 20

Choose the Feed to Get

You have a choice of the feeds for the FeedManager to return. In this sample I am interested in the Users feed (or timeline or whatever you call it today.) So I’ll use the getFeedFor method and pass a username. (I get the user name from the Search Result, more on this later.) If I wanted the logged in users Personal Feed I would use getFeed and pass SP.Social.SocialFeedType.personal, for News pass SP.Social.SocialFeedType.news and timeline takes SP.Social.SocialFeedType.timeline.

targetUserFeed = feedManager.getFeedFor(targetUser, feedOptions);

Load the ClientContext and Execute

The last step is to load the ClientContext and then execute the query. The query function takes a success and failure callback. If successful we can write the results to the UI, if fail you can write the error (or handle it some other way) or just pass null and ignore the error.

clientContext.load(feedManager);
clientContext.executeQueryAsync(CallIterateFunctionForFeeds, RequestFailed);

Integrating with Search

There are many new features in Search for SharePoint 2013. I plan to write a couple articles about how to create cool new search visualizations using Display Templates, but for now I’ll show you a quick way to add your code to the People Search Result template.

1. Open Design Manager for your Search Site and navigate to  \\site\_catalogs\DIsplay Templates\Search in explorer.
2. Make a copy of Item_Person.html and Item_Person_HoverPanel.html. Rename these copies to Item_Person_Social.html and Item_Person_Social_HoverPanel.html respectively.
3. Open Item_Person.html in any editor and change the Title tag to “People Social Item”.
4. Next, locate the following line in the head:
   

   var hoverUrl = “~sitecollection/_catalogs/masterpage/Display Templates/Search/Item_Person_HoverPanel.js”;

5. Change it to point to your new Social Hover panel:
   

   var hoverUrl = “~sitecollection/_catalogs/masterpage/Display Templates/Search/Item_Person_Social_HoverPanel.js”;

6. Save and Close the file.
7. Open Item_Person_Social_HoverPanel.html and insert your code. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish you may need to play around with where to put your code. In my case I added the new variables and methods on line 54, just before the line:

   if ($isEmptyString(uname)) { uname = ctx.CurrentItem.YomiDisplayName }
   

8. You need a place to display your results. I did this in my Hover Panel display template by using the same look and feel from the rest of the page. Notice the special tag socialId. I’ll elaborate on this in the Tricks session.

   <li>
   	<div class="ms-srch-hover-subTitle"><h3 class="ms-soften">SPC Social Feed</h3></div>
   	<table width="100%" id="_#= socialId =#_"></table><br/>
   	<span id="spanMessage_#= socialId =#_" style="color: #FF0000;"></span>
   </li>
   

9. Finally, you need to call all this code from some event, like after the whole page has loaded. The best method to use in a Search Results page is the AddPostRenderCallback method. This ensures that the whole page has loaded before you call your code. The full description is in the next section.

   //SPC: Post Render Callback
   AddPostRenderCallback(ctx, function(){
   	console.log("Post render callback: " + ctx.CurrentItem.AccountName + "(" + socialId + ")");
   	SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext',function()
   	{
   		console.log("Calling GetFeeds in execFunc...");
   		GetFeeds(ctx.CurrentItem.AccountName, true );
   	});
   });
   

10. Save and Close the page. To make your page live in the Search results, see the How to Render Social Results trick below.

Search Page Tricks

As I worked through this demo I found that many of the challenges were caused by the new Search page loading procedure. You have to be certain that your code runs after the page is finished loading. I also needed to target specific di tags on the result page. I used another trick to ensure that I had unique IDs on the page. I solved these two challenges as follows.

Script Load Timing

If your scripts fail to load correctly you will get the dreaded “Unable to get Client Context” or you will simply have a null ClientContext to deal with. I found that, for a while, my script worked fine, then, later for no apparent reason, they did not. Some process changed the timing and now my script was failing. In order to force SharePoint to ensure that my script loaded correctly I found that I had to call SP.SOD.executeFunc. You may be familiar with executeOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded, I was, but I found that it would randomly fail and not throw an error. I found executeFunc to be the most reliable function for this purpose. So, in the end, I wrapped my GetFeeds function with the executeFunc to ensure that I would always get a ClientContext.

Unique Tag IDs

If you look at the Table that I created in the display template above, I used a substitution tag for the page of socialId. The “_#=” markup is used by the Display Template to perform replacements when the page is running. (I really need to write a post about this…). The cool thing is it will replace any page variable. In my case I needed to uniquely identify the tables for the social data I was returning. All I had to do was create a variable and then reference it in my code. I create the variable like this:

var socialId = encodedId + "_hoverSocial";

Which appends “_hoverSocial” to the unique encoded ID of the result that was hovered over. Now I have a variable for my JQuery to reference the right instance of the table for my Social Results.

Get the Target User Name

In my scenario I wanted the User Name of the person I am looking at in the Search Results page. Since this is a People Search Result I have access to the Managed Property “AccountName” that is associated with the context of the CurrentItem. (OK, I seriously need to write up another post to make this more clear.) Any way, if you look at the method where I am calling GetFeeds, I pass in the </li> as ctx.CurrentItem.AccountName.

How to Render the Social Results

One of the trickier parts of making this work has nothing to do with development. I simply needed to change the behavior of People Search so that SharePoint would load my result types rather than the defaults. Here are the steps to make that happen. Note, you have to have already added the Item_Person_Social and Item_Person_Social_HoverPanel HTML files before you attempt this action. They need to be present to get the wire-up to work.

1. In the Search Site | Site Settings choose Result Types from the Search Section.
2. Choose New Result Type.
3. Provide the following information:
   • Name: Social Person
   • Conditions: Local People Results
   • Action: People Social Item (This is your display template. You remembered to publish it, right?) The display template URL should match your file name.
4. Click Save and you should see your new Result Type at the top of the list. Since it is at the top it is going to over rule the one for the default People results.
5. Test your work by executing a People query in the search center and you should see your new template and hover panel. (If not, debug it as you normally would debug JavaScript.) Remember, the person you found has to have Social Data for this to work, so create a My Site for them and add a couple posts.

Final Results

The final results are simple but they show how powerful this new version of SharePoint is for developers. We are able to implement a cool addition to search using the out of the box APIs and without deploying code to the server (beyond the JavaScript that we just waded through).

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You can get more details about the class from Critical Path Training. There are other classes scheduled, but this is the last SharePoint 2010 Administrators Survival Camp for the year in central Texas.

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