Making a change in a SharePoint page


  • BINNED

    So I've got to change a minor thing on some SharePoint pages. Or it would be a minor thing. Unfortunately SharePoint decided that the only valid workflow to get it working is following exact sequence:

    1. Open page
    2. Wait until the ribbon is loaded and usable
    3. Open edit mode
    4. Click on the right location where you want to add something
    5. Click insert
    6. Click on webpart
    7. select webpart to insert from the fold out
    8. click where you want it in the page, because your cursor is no longer blinking their
    9. click add
    10. wait until the meaningless "Sorry there was an error" page is loaded
    11. Re-open page
    12. Wait until the ribbon is loaded and usable
    13. Open edit mode
    14. Click on the right location where you want to add something
    15. Click insert
    16. Click on webpart
    17. select webpart to insert from the fold out
    18. Click add
    19. Wait on the webpart to be added and loaded
    20. Click on the tiny webpart menu thingy
    21. Wait until the drop down menu is correctly displayed
    22. Choose edit
    23. Wait until the page is reloaded, resized to fit the options and reloaded
    24. Change the view
    25. Click ok on the useless warning
    26. Click on the + sign
    27. Change 1 setting
    28. Click on other + sign
    29. Change 1 setting
    30. Click Ok
    31. Click 'Save and publish'
    32. Wait until SharePoint reloads the page to show you witch new way it found to 💩 over your page/script/layout

    Told you it was an easy change!



  • The only nice about Sharepoint is that it is not PHP. :smug:


  • BINNED

    So I just have to be happy it's not Drupal then?



  • @Luhmann said:

    So I just have to be happy it's not Drupal then?

    yes when in doubt,look at your fat paycheck and slim blonde wife :-)


  • BINNED

    My paycheck is slim and my wife is fat. So I suppose I am the RWTF



  • @Luhmann said:

    My paycheck is slim and my wife is fat. So I suppose I am the RWTF

    If you look at my paycheck you'll weep with tars in your eyes. So I could be TRWTF, but always look at glass half-full and not glass empty. If your wife is not slim, be happy that she is attractive person and she likes you.


  • BINNED

    @Nagesh said:

    So I could be TRWTF, but always look at glass half-full and not glass empty.

    Half full or empty... freaking quantum liquids, not having a state between half and empty. And they change every time you look at them!

    Also, I'm always looking at it as a glass' content being 50% air and 50% gas.


    Filed under: Fucking up your proverbs since the pigs flew



  • @Onyx said:

    Half full or empty... freaking quantum liquids, not having a state between half and empty. And they change every time you look at them!

    On an elementary particle level, glasses are always pretty empty.


  • BINNED

    @Keith said:

    On an elementary particle level, glasses are always pretty empty.

    On subatomic level most of the universe is nothing but empty space. But we don't tell that to "ordinary" people 'cause they either call you mad or go mad themselves.



  • @Onyx said:

    On subatomic level most of the universe is nothing but empty space.

    And on that level, what is matter really? Just standing waves and forces between them?


  • BINNED

    @Keith said:

    And on that level, what is matter really? Just standing waves and forces between them?

    From what I gathered, something like that, yes. IANAP though. So I choose not to bother with that and abstract stuff up to molecules or atoms, depending on the situation. Gets tiring otherwise. Cool, but tiring.



  • All of us are existing in consciousness of Vishnu, so let us not argue on that for now.



  • The best thing about Sharepoint is that I don't have to work with it.



  • @chubertdev said:

    The best thing about Sharepoint is that I don't have to work with it.

    A real developer works with any tool thrown at them.


  • BINNED



  • @Nagesh said:

    A real developer works with any tool thrown at them.

    Who throws a shoe?


  • @Nagesh said:

    A real developer works with any tool thrown at them.

    Is @Nagesh a real developer? Let's find out by throwing lots of sharp, pointy tools at it.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Is @Nagesh a real developer? Let's find out by throwing lots of sharp, pointy tools at it.

    😊
    http://imgur.com/d6X16RS



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Is @Nagesh a real developer? Let's find out by throwing lots of sharp, pointy tools at it.

    What happened to that PHP hammer?


  • :belt_onion:

    Hey that's exactly our workflow, except you're missing the 15 steps for opening the webpart's properties to put in all the parameters for displaying the correct information. And I'm pretty sure you skipped at least 5 "Sorry something went wrong" messages.



  • Hang on let me confirm.... (looking down at paycheck...looking up at wife)...Yep. I was able to reproduce this.



  • Yes but when he fucks them up...They have more meaning. There is a word for that but it is escaped.


  • BINNED

    @darkmatter said:

    And I'm pretty sure you skipped at least 5 "Sorry something went wrong" messages.

    Jeah I optimized my process.
    What's up with the "Sorry something went wrong" errors? In like 50% or more of the cases you can just F5 and the page will be there including your requested change. But then sometimes you can't and it 💩s its pants.


  • :belt_onion:

    The problem is that "sorry something went wrong" is what they use for literally EVERY kind of error. The only things that don't give that message are 404s and access denied. I take it back, access denied toggles between triggering sorry something went wrong page, redirecting you to an access denied page, or redirecting to a site has not been shared page.
    Authentication? Yep. Error in a webpart's code? Yep. Search failure? Yep. Error in a webpart configuration? Yep.

    And if you have a large enough internal network that you have an AD network with multiple domain servers and require dual authentication for your Sharepoint website then you're just fucked. You will mire in "Sorry something went wrong" messages every time someone's cookie times out and the server is too fucking retarded to figure out to re-authenticate. Instead it passes the bogus auth ticket deep enough into the bowels of hell that the only possible result Sharepoint could ever give is clearly, "Sorry, something went wrong."

    edit - by the way, looking up the "correlation id" in the logs generally just finds "access denied errors" in these instances. How hard is it for them to just print access fucking denied. As if the user is going to send us the correlation id to trouble shoot these errors (which, by the way, a user can't do without hand-typing the goddamn id or take a screenshot which means now I have to hand-copy the stupid id because they do it in an UNSELECTABLE FUCKING TEXT BLOCK. At least it's not selectable in IE. Which, you know, is what microsoft created and you would think would work properly with their own webserver software.

    By the way, fuck Sharepoint 2013.


  • BINNED

    @darkmatter said:

    UNSELECTABLE FUCKING TEXT BLOCK.

    Hum nice, ever even tried to select/copy/look them up. Some way I always felt that was a useless exercise.

    Also Bonus points for developing a workflow with SharePoint Designer. The minute you do something iffy, like say put a variable of the wrong type in the wrong place the workflow will just hang on execution. Endlessly without error, without message or further indication. Hope you inserted some messages to the history so you can at least begin to guess where you have an issue. But don't try to actually log usefull stuff to the workflow history because of course the workflow history only accepts text strings so chances are your effort to debug the situation will just make the workflow hang.

    You know what is worse then SharePoint 2013? SharePoint 2013 Online.
    You know what is worse then SharePoint 2013 Online? The Belgium be damned public facing part of it. It is so wrapped up in nice marketing and management speak that it is almost impossible to actually determine before you start what specific limitations MS invented and what parts/features are scrapped or not accessible or there but just not usable like you can in a normal SP site.


  • BINNED

    @darkmatter said:

    UNSELECTABLE FUCKING TEXT BLOCK

    Oh, I'm gonna guess that's a feature now with MS.

    I mentioned this somewhere already, but something I had to install to get .NET 4.5 installed on Windows XP (I think it might be the .NET 4.5 installer itself) generates a log file in HTML. The error box, of course, just spews out "Error during installation".

    So looking into the log file, it actually knows what's missing (Windows imaging component I think), but it's not gonna show you a link in the error message. Fuck you.

    In any case, the HTML file somehow managed to crash every other browser other than IE6 (yeah, the machine wasn't updated properly). The link in the log file was not clickable. Nor selectable. NONE of the text was selectable. I had to open the source just to copy the link so I can download it.



  • There is precisely one decent thing about developing for Sharepoint, and that is a 3rd party JS library - http://spservices.codeplex.com/ - which allows you to code the Site Pages as static HTML, and then use AJAX to query the lists, and thus generate content on the fly.

    Everything else, in my experience (SP 2010) is dogshit.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @chubertdev said:

    The best thing about Sharepoint is that I don't have to work with it.

    Having used Sharepoint a little bit (it's my project's document repository roach motel) about all I can report that it isn't quite as nasty as a BSCW.

    Filed under: you can't have BSCW without BS


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    edit - by the way, looking up the "correlation id" in the logs generally just finds "access denied errors" in these instances. How hard is it for them to just print access fucking denied. As if the user is going to send us the correlation id to trouble shoot these errors (which, by the way, a user can't do without hand-typing the goddamn id or take a screenshot which means now I have to hand-copy the stupid id because they do it in an UNSELECTABLE FUCKING TEXT BLOCK. At least it's not selectable in IE. Which, you know, is what microsoft created and you would think would work properly with their own webserver software.

    Is it one of those lightbox-type message boxes or a native window's dialog? Ctrl-C normally works on the latter without any extra effort.



  • @darkmatter said:

    The problem is that "sorry something went wrong" is what they use for literally EVERY kind of error. The only things that don't give that message are 404s and access denied.

    Wait, you actually get 404's and access denied? For me, every error is either "Something went wrong" or "That didn't work" with no further explanation in the solution section.

    @PJH said:

    Is it one of those lightbox-type message boxes or a native window's dialog?

    Bog standard DIV that looks something like this:

    <div class="ms-spo-technicalSection" style="user-select: none; -ms-user-select:none" unselectable="on" />
    

  • BINNED

    I failed at repo here of @darkmatter's issue. As stated it is not really hard to get this page when fooling around with webparts. Using IE9 agains SharePoint365.

    Yeah, I know the real wtf is Dutch.

    A bonus WTF: the 'technical' details list a date/time but no timezone. And it sure as hell isn't a quarter before five in the morning right now.



  • @Luhmann said:

    A bonus WTF: the 'technical' details list a date/time but no timezone. And it sure as hell isn't a quarter before five in the morning right now.

    US/Pacific_Daylight_Time, because "Hello from Seattle."


  • BINNED

    @TwelveBaud said:

    access denied

    You should get a you don't have access, ask for it page or something like this

    @TwelveBaud said:

    Hello from Seattle.

    That could explain why 365 is so slow if it has to fetch its error pages straight from Seattle.



  • @Luhmann said:

    Yeah, I know the real wtf is Dutch.

    OPDRACHT OF BESTANDSNAAM ONJUIST

     


  • BINNED

    @dhromed said:

    OPDRACHT OF BESTANDSNAAM ONJUIST

    Should be BESTAND_NIET_GEVONDEN





  • @Luhmann said:

    Should be BESTAND_NIET_GEVONDEN

    Soms vermoed ik dat ik misschien een iets andere mening zou hebben, of me iets anders zou gedragen, als internet in het Nederlands was.

    Maar het is een hoop werk om dat te testen, want ik moet alles handmatig op natuurlijke wijze vertalen.


  • BINNED

    Ik heb eerst heel lang in een internationale, engelstalige omgeving gewerkt en nu 100% nederlands. Enkele jaren verder ben ik het nog altijd niet gewoon. Professionele IT dingen klinken om één of andere manier beter in het engels.
    In het nederlands raak je niet ver op het internet. In tegenstelling tot bv. Duits of Frans. Als je pakket/oplossing in Duitsland of Frankrijk wil slijten moet het in het Duits/Frans zijn. In Nederland en België kan je weg komen met "Nee sorry, de Nederlandse vertaling is nog niet beschikbaar."


  • :belt_onion:

    @Luhmann said:

    Also Bonus points for developing a workflow with SharePoint Designer. The minute you do something iffy, like say put a variable of the wrong type in the wrong place the workflow will just hang on execution.

    "Something iffy"? Like, open the people picker? That causes a crash for us 100% of the time when editing a workflow in Sharepoint Designer. Workflows are pretty much impossible to do in Designer, since you kinda need to be able to pick people for the workflows to function! We figured at first that it was just because we'd bought 2013 in its first year and the designer would be fixed shortly... now it has been almost 2 years and there hasn't been another patch. The "Designer" doesn't even have a fucking "designer" in it. They neutered the designer portion out because it worked on an IE6 engine and Sharepoint2013 pretty much has nothing that renders intelligibly in IE6 mode. Rather than fix it they just took the design piece out entirely.

    @scudsucker said:

    thus generate content on the fly

    This would be nice, if it didn't break the site search feature, which isn't capable of dealing with ajaxed content. Unfortunately the search is half the reason of why our higher ups wanted sharepoint in the first place.

    @Luhmann said:

    Using IE9 agains SharePoint365

    We're using a local Sharepoint install, not the online office365 or whatever version. I think the unselectable-ness has to do with the them/layout that is being used, because some of our other stuff becomes unselectable in certain places in their layout. We haven't gotten to the point of nitpicking whether certain texts are selectable so I haven't bothered looking into why that happens yet.


  • BINNED

    I think that is a rather obvious error, after all it really didn't work did it?

    I think it might also be related to how authentication is configured. There are also some general settings that determine if SharePoints offers you a request access page or not and so on. There also seems to be a difference in what you are requesting. I know I used to get really friendly errors when opening a document through a link that somebody removed my rights from but the error above was from trying to access an administrative page for a site where I don't have that rights.


  • BINNED

    @darkmatter said:

    people picker

    I thought I used that one?

    @darkmatter said:

    The "Designer" doesn't even have a fucking "designer" in it.

    I have a rather strong feeling that Designer is dead and that they just needed to put it on life support for SharePoint 2013 so Microsoft could buy itself some time and have the workflow design be available elsewhere in the next version. Just like InfoPath 2013 is just a front until they release follow up technology in the next office/sharepoint release (or sooner in the Cloud).



  • That's probably it. I'm a federated user, not a traditional user, so I'm probably getting what should be "Access is denied" messages. Still, "That didn't work" is just as ridiculously nondescriptive as "Something went wrong".


  • :belt_onion:

    Even better in Designer is if you try to edit a master page or page layout template....
    If there are any HTML comments in the page, the designer has a tendency to eat them and turn the <!--​ into the escaped HTML "&lt;!--" and then randomly starts escaping other things from that point on in your page, which completely jacks your page up. Fortunately practically every example from MS and built-in page in sharepoint has tons of that HTML markup.

    We have to download the pages, edit in Visual Studio, then re-upload. Almost the only thing I use designer for anymore is to edit lists' custom item view/edit pages. If you can use anything else to do anything, it's almost always better to use that something else, because 99% of the time Sharepoint Designer just breaks your stuff instead.


  • :belt_onion:

    @TwelveBaud said:

    should be "Access is denied" messages

    http://yoursitename/_layouts/15/accessdenied.aspx is the default access denied page... it's just "Sorry, this site hasn't been shared with you." or something custom I supposed if you change where it goes. When we get that on an internal call like ajax, occasionally it will print "Sorry, something went wrong" and then with the correlation id it will also say "Access Denied". But only sometimes.



  • @Luhmann said:

    Should be BESTAND_NIET_GEVONDEN

    Slovenian Windows 7 and 8 do something like that in the Action center:

    #IMEZADNJEGAPROG# is a translation of something like #LASTPROGNAME#.



  • Is SharePoint more or less of a WTF than PHP?



  • @Arantor said:

    Is SharePoint more or less of a WTF than PHP?

    Less!!!!


  • BINNED

    Less. It has it retarded corners, it is a pain in the butt on the level that sits between the normal users and the real development stuff. The stuff mentioned above is not real development. No code is being written. Its implementation stuff. It's application management. Designer and InfoPath and related are thought up to sit between what is being developed based on the Office & SharePoint APIs and what normal users day to day use and see. It is meant to be for non-developers to do change/enhance the environment. And that is where the crazy stuff is happening. What I was doing in my 30-some step program was actually: let the SharePoint engine create a dynamic aspx page that creates the actual user interface but let's all manege it visually from within the browser by throwing some default building blocks together. Then top it off with some javascript, css, calling some SharePoint APIs and parsing the JSON result for good fun. And all configured through the browser because the fucker is high up in the cloud.
    After my 30 steps the pages are fine. They will run without flaw. People who visit the page won't even know it's SharePoint. My colleagues maintaining the content will just put some data and text in some fields and it will populate the content. It will be searchable without any additional work,unlike say discourse. The problem is getting there.



  • @Luhmann said:

    let the SharePoint engine create a dynamic aspx page that creates the actual user interface but let's all manege it visually from within the browser by throwing some default building blocks together.

    So, it's a bit like SSIS? Man, I hated that stuff.



  • Software translators are TRWTF. I've seen people translate %s and %d


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