Modern

Creating hyperlinks to missing pages in modern SharePoint

Beau Cameron3 Comments

If you ever used the classic Wiki pages in SharePoint, there was a really cool feature that allowed users to link to pages that did not exist yet. In SharePoint Wikis, you could link to another page on your site using the double bracket syntax. Example:

Please go to the [[Announcements]] page.

SharePoint would handle this by connecting the the Announcements page to the text within the brackets. The really cool thing about this is if a user clicked on a link to a page that didn’t exist it yet, SharePoint would ask them to create a new page! This is similar to how Wikipedia creates empty hyperlinks to pages that still need to be created.

A question came up in a SharePoint sub-reddit asking whether this works in Modern SharePoint. The answer is YES!

Back to basics

To see this feature in action, create a new page in your SharePoint site and add a text webpart to the page.

Let’s say at the end of this text, we would like to add a link to an existing page within this site. All we have to do is start typing “[[” and SharePoint will return all the pages we can link to.

 

If we wanted to link to the Singapore trip report page, we could then just click that page from the dropdown, and it will become a direct link to that page. Pretty cool right!?

Creating a new page from a link

Now that we have seen how using the “[[” allows users to link to existing pages, lets see how Microsoft brought forward the classic Wiki linking functionality to allow users to create hyperlinks to pages that do not exist yet.

To do so, start by typing “[[“, but ignore the dropdown values for existing pages. Continue typing in the title for a new page and close it with two double brackets “]]”. Make sure you press space key or click away from the “]]” or else the resulting link will be a 404.

Once this happens, SharePoint will automatically create a hyperlink for us.

If you look closely at the link, you’ll notice that the URL points to a new page (doesn’t exist), and it passes along the ?wikiTitle=Communication query string.

The wikiTitle query string parameter notifies SharePoint to not throw a 404 error, but instead initiate the new modern page creation flow. When a user clicks on this link, SharePoint will popup the page template selection screen!

Once a user selects a template, they will be brought to the new Communication page to continue editing and finish creating the page.

This page has also now been linked correctly to our previous page!

Diagnosing changes with the Modern SharePoint page version history.

Beau CameronLeave a comment

If you love SharePoint, then you already know about it’s rich document and information management capabilities. Version history is a feature of SharePoint that is extremely powerful if you need to look back in history at the changes of an item. This works great if you are working with list items only, as you can see how the fields have changed on a specific item overtime. For documents and pages, SharePoint version history is unable to show us exactly what has changed within those pages.

Turns out, in modern SharePoint we do have better version history which shows us what changes have been done to modern site pages! This is an extremely powerful tool to keep track of changes of your modern SharePoint site pages over time. 

Viewing Version History

In order to view the version history of your modern SharePoint site pages, navigate to the page in question. In my scenario, we’ll be looking at a Communication site home page which has a series of hero, news and events web parts on it.Homepage

Accessing the version history is easy. On the page in question, select the “Published” button next to the “Edit” button in the top right of the page. The page will re-render and load a slide out panel from the right hand side, showing the version history of the page.

HomeVersion

Notice how you can see a history of changes that were completed on the page. In my example, edits were made to News, Spacer, Text, Quicklinks, and Events between version v3.0 and v2.0. If I would like to dive into this a bit more, I can select “Highlight changes on the page” toggle from the top of the panel. When turning this one, new boxes will highlight around the web parts that were changed with a specific color.

HomeVersion2

Green means added, Yellow means edited and Red means deleted.
How awesome is that!? Do you think this is valuable? Any new features you’d love to see come to version history?

Rendering multi-value Choice fields vertically using JSON Column Formatting

Beau Cameron1 Comment

Recently I was perusing a SharePoint forum post and a member asked if there was a way to change the visual representation of a multiple value choice field in SharePoint. My first thought was to use JSON Column Formatting.

The problem

By default, SharePoint renders a multiple value choice field as a single string in a row, and renders the HTML as a single value in a div.

HTMLChoiceField

One question, if you aren’t familiar with JSON Column Formatting is how would we render these items as new lines if they represented as a single value in the HTML. You’d probably first go and see if you could split on the commas “,”… but unfortunately column formatting does not support a split function.

Introducing ‘forEach’

One feature that column formatting does have is the forEach function. This is an optional property that allows an element to duplicate itself for each member of a multi-valued field. To loop through multi-value fields we’d use the following format

"iteratorName in @currentField" or "iteratorName in [$FieldName]"

Once you’ve implemented the forEach, you have access to each member you are looping through by using the iterator name. For example, if we loop through @currentField using the following formula: "iteratorName in @currentField" we can gain access to each record using [$iteratorName].

Putting it into action

Now that we know we can loop through multi-choice fields, all we need to do is come up with a JSON column formatter which creates each record on it’s own row. See the below JSON object.

We are using the forEach property to loop through each choice value in the currentField. For each record, we set the textContext equal to the choice record, and then we just style the div to be displayed block and 100%

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/v2/column-formatting.schema.json",
  "debugMode": true,
  "elmType": "div",
  "children": [
    {
      "elmType": "div",
      "style": {
        "display": "block",
        "width": "100%"
      },
      "forEach": "choice in @currentField",
      "txtContent": "[$choice]"
    }
  ]
}

The end result turns the original choice field, to be rendered like so:

ChoicesHTML

MultipleLineChoice

 

Finding all Delve Blogs in your tenant using Search

Beau CameronLeave a comment

Recently, Microsoft has announced they are retiring Delve blogs. In doing so, Microsoft has also given us a schedule of important dates relating to the retirement.

  • Beginning December 18th, 2019, tenants will not have the ability to create new Delve Blogs
  • Beginning January 18th, 2020 the ability to create new posts in existing Delve blogs will be discontinued
  • Beginning April 17th, 2020, existing Delve blogs will be deleted and removed from Delve profiles

If your organization has been using Delve blogs, you are probably thinking “wow, I don’t have much time to migrate Delve blogs into communication sites“. That’s correct, it does feel pretty rushed. If you are looking into finding all of the blog sites in your tenant, here is a search query to help you out.

Search Query

* path:yourtenant/portals/personal* ContentType:"Story Page"'&selectproperties='Author,SPWebUrl'

Search via REST

https://yourtenant/_api/search/query?queryText=’* path:yourtenant/portals/personal* ContentType:”Story Page”‘&selectproperties=’Author,SPWebUrl’

Search Explained

The above search query is fairly simple. It will search everything (*) where the path starts with the Delve Blog locations (path:yourtenant/portals/personal*) where the Content Type is the content type used for Delve Blogs (Story Page).

Another method for finding all blogs being used in your tenant is by using the Modernization Scanner. This is a tool that was designed to help companies modernize their classic sites by scanning tenants looking for things like InfoPath usage, Classic Workflows and more.

Well, starting in version 2.7, it will include the ability to scan your tenant for Delve blogs, using the same search methods above.