New Delegate Controls in SharePoint 2013

Delegate Controls are very significant medium to make changes to master page without touching the code part. In SharePoint 2010, we had a lot of delegate controls. To name a few we had : AdditionalPageHead, SmallSearchInputBox etc.

Now in SharePoint 2013, three new delegate controls were introduced. These were actually based on the new master page structure in SP 2013. Since in SharePoint 2013 we have "suites" defined in layout i.e left suite bar and right suite bar, so the delegate controls are based on them.

They may be summarized as below:

PromotedActions

SuiteBarBrandingDelegate

SuiteLinksDelegate

PromotedActions delegate control is that part of header which contains links like "Share","Edit" etc. So we can use this delegate control to add our own controls to the header as shown below:

And the code for user control is as simple as :

 <a title="Open Facebook" class="ms-promotedActionButton" style="display: inline-block;" href="http://www.facebook.com">  
 <span class="s4-clust ms-promotedActionButton-icon" style="width: 16px; height: 16px; overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; position: relative;">  
 <img style="position:absolute;" alt="facebook" src="/_layouts/15/images/MyDelegateControls/facebook.png"/>  
 </span>  
   <span class="ms-promotedActionButton-text">Post on Facebook</span>  
 </a>  




SuitingBarBrandingDelegate  Delegate Control facilitates us to override the left-top corner text for the site. By default it is "SharePoint". So we can replace it with the title of our own site:

User Control: (SuiteBarBrandingDelegateCustom ascx)

 <div class="ms-core-brandingText" id="SiteTitleControl" runat="server" />   

Code behind: (SuiteBarBrandingDelegateCustom.ascx.cs)

 protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)  
 {  
   SiteTitleControl.Controls.Add(new Literal  
   {  
     Text = string.Format("<a href='{0}'><img src='{1}' alt='{2}' /></a>", SPContext.Current.Site.Url,  
     "/_layouts/15/images/MyDelegateControls/sitelogo.png", SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.Title)  
   });  
 }  

SuiteLinksDelegate delegate control allow us to add  links in right suite bar like "Newsfeed","Sites" etc. :

User Control Code Behind:

 protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)  
   {  
     writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Style);  
     writer.Write(".ms-core-suiteLinkList {display: inline-block;}");  
     writer.RenderEndTag();  
     writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, "ms-core-suiteLinkList");  
     writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Ul);  
     RenderSuiteLink(writer, "http://www.myreports.com", "Report", "TimeManagement", false);  
      writer.RenderEndTag();  
     base.Render(writer);  
   }  

Note : For all these delegate controls , you need to add a reference in Elements.xml file to specify the control id and control source properties:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  
 <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">  
  <Control ControlSrc="/_controltemplates/15/MyDelegateControls/UserControl.ascx"  
      Id="DelegateControlID" //ID of DelegateControl e.g. "SuiteLinksDelegate"  
      Sequence="1" />  
 </Elements>  

A list survey discussion board or document library with the specified title already exists error

A few days ago i came up with a strange error while navigating to Site Settings > Title,Logo and Description in a share point site.

The error was :

I did a lot of digging around but was unable to find the relevant issue. The logs were showing errors like "Exception thrown" or "list not found" etc. Then somewhere in the logs i saw this error

"The list "$Resources:core,webpageassetList;" in web "http://mysite/site" was not created"

So it seemed then while enabling the "Wiki Home Page" feature, "Assets Library" was created but somehow lost its context or reference in ContentDB.

So i deleted the current assets library and re-created it. And finally i was able to resolve the navigation issue.

Running ECMAScript under Anonymous access

Client Object Model in SharePoint has been quite significant since its introduction in SharePoint 2010. It does allow us to rapidly build web parts in JSOM/ECMA  with little or no need for compiled code.

The functionality is quite simple and involves creating some functions and executing them asynchronously. This behavior prevents our browser from freezing until the response has come back from the server.

Now we need to take care of some important things while creating web parts using ECMAScript. Since the pages would be accessed  by visitors and may also be accessed by anonymous users, so site admins need to take care of the proper permissions.

Anonymous users , by default,  do not have the privilege of requesting the server for resources even for read only access. One of the example may be like if there is a picture library in the site and a carousel web part on the home page is displaying those pictures . In such cases, while accessing the home page, the anonymous users will get the following error:

It occurs because anonymous users are restricted on requesting the server for "GetItems" property of the list. This behavior is default for anonymous users.

So in order to prevent this error, the site admin must execute the following script in powershell:

 $webapp = Get-SPWebApplication “http://somesite/”

 $webapp.ClientCallableSettings.AnonymousRestrictedTypes.Remove([microsoft.sharepoint.splist], "GetItems") 

 $webapp.Update()

Before doing this make sure "Anonymous Access" is allowed in Web Application: