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Showing posts from 2014

Toggling Between Content Types in SharePoint 2010

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Introduction In this post we are going to go through how to toggle between different content types in a list, after firing the Add and/or Edit form. Now, we all know that we can do that from the ribbon on the top of the page (before firing the add form) like so: However, I came across a customer requirement, which requested to be able to toggle between content types after firing the add form, which we'll address in this post. Scenario Company ABC , requests to have a list called Employees , which contains two content types: Employee Manager Now, for the sake of simplicity,the Manager content type differs by one extra site column from the Employee content type. I have assumed that a manager gets a parking space in the company's building (Perfect!) Content types looks as follows: Employee Manager First Name

Connecting to OData Feeds with Excel 2013

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OData feeds, is connecting to data sources that supports Open Data Protocol, which is a data access protocol initially defined by Microsoft, it is similar to JDBC and ODBC although OData is not limited to SQL databases, the protocol was designed to provide standard CRUD access to a data source via a website. OData is the protocol is the data API for Microsoft Azure. Also one of the most popular OData client implementations are Microsoft SharePoint 2010, 2013 and WCF Data Services. There are two main ways to connect to OData feeds with Excel, which I'm going to address in this post.  Say we are to connect to a SharePoint list called resources: Connecting with Power Query Open Excel and under POWER QUERY ribbon tab, click From Other Sources > From OData Feed. In the OData Feed dialog box, enter the URL for an OData feed then click OK.  Note:  When connecting to SharePoint lists, usually your URL would be in the following format http://{WebApplication}/{Sit

Step by Step: Power BI Q&A in Office 365

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While I was exploring the awesomeness of Power BI in Excel 2013 and Office 365, I came across this amazing feature of Power BI  Q&A . Simply, Q&A is a way to interact with your data, to filter, sort, aggregate, group and display data using natural language! Yea, you read that correctly, natural language!  I was really blown away by this smart yet indeed useful feature. Well, in this post I'll lay down how to utilize this amazing feature, step by step. Prerequisites First of all, Power BI features associated with SharePoint are only available with Office 365 (cloud only, not available on-prem). In order to get Power BI capabilities (app) with Office 365, you need to register for Power BI for Office 365 . You need to have Excel 2013 Professional Plus installed on your local machine. Finally, you need to start PowerPivot add-in Excel 2013 . Collect and Model Your Data There are various astonishing ways to collect your data with Excel 2013, however, I

Naming Convention - Coding (Part 6)

The following points applies for all the sections that follows: Never use all caps. Only use Pascal or camel casing. Never use Hungarian Notation. Again, avoid using abbreviations unless the name is too long (exceptions: common abbreviations, medical abbreviations, banking abbreviations, etc…). Avoid abbreviations longer than 5 characters. Use uppercase for 2 letter abbreviation and Pascal case for longer ones.               // Example CountryEU CountryGcc Never add redundant or meaningless prefixes and suffixes . // Bad Practice             public enum LanguageEnum             public class   CEmployee public struct ChangeStruct Never include the class name in the property name . // Bad Practice             Customer .customerName // Good Practice             Customer .name Always prefix Boolean variables and properties with either Can , Is or Has. Classes or Structs Use Pascal casing only. Use a noun or noun phrase for