It’s that time of the year again when kids will be kids and grown-ups can be kids. I’m talking about Halloween. Halloween is one of the more festive events in the year, in my opinion. You have tons of candies, parties everywhere, and costumes galore. When it comes to costumes, there are some people who really dress-up. And then there some who simply don a mask for their Halloween costume. Masking is the inspiration for today’s post: input-masking in SharePoint Forms.
Input-masking is a programmng technique which allows applications specify the rules for the data-inputs. For example, ZIP codes should be 5-digit numeric number or phone numbers should be numeric (mostly) and appear in the form of (111) 555-0000. In SharePoint, you will see fields in some forms that should have a mask for the input. Take the Contacts List as an example: a contact has phone numbers and ZIP code. Yet, SharePoint doesn’t validate what users input in those fields. Take a look:
Invalid format for phone-number in SP Contact Form
SharePoint allowed invalid phone number
If SharePoint site-definition forms will not enforce input-masking, we can easily apply it ourselves using jQuery JavaScript library. You can dowload the jQuery jlibrary here. (You can link to jQuery library from one of the Google sites; I only recommend you download the js file itself in the event you’re running your development sandbox in an isolated network). You will also need to download the input-mask jQuery plugin. Upload the jQuery js file and the input-mask plug-in (another js file) into a “scripts” library in your SharePoint site.
Open-up the SharePoint Site and edit the list’s NewForm.aspx or EditForm.aspx in SharePoint Designer. In this example, we are editing the Contacts List EditForm.aspx. You want to look for the table element whose ID is onetIDListForm. Insert the following code just below the table.onetIDListForm element:
<script src="../../scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
<script src="../../scripts/jquery.maskedinput-1.2.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$("input[title='Business Phone']").mask("(999) 999-9999");
$("input[title='Home Phone']").mask("(999) 999-9999");
$("input[title='Mobile Phone']").mask("(999) 999-9999");
$("input[title='ZIP/Postal Code']").mask("99999");
});
</script>
I will write another blog-post about jQuery. For now, I will quickly explain what the code above does. $(“input[title='Business Phone']“) selects the text-box for the Business Phone field. There are different ways to select elements using jQuery. What I did above as select the input whose title is “Business Phone”. After the element has been matched, we call the plugin’s Mask() method. Why not select the input-element using the ID? Because you do not know nor control what ID value will be generated by SharePoint. The typical input element generated by SharePoint looks like the following:
<input name="ctl00$m$g_d1b9fb52_9f94_4f65_b370_2c23efb30c7e$
ctl00$ctl04$ctl08$ctl00$ctl00
$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$TextField"
type="text" maxlength="255"
id="ctl00_m_g_d1b9fb52_9f94_4f65_b370_2c23efb30c7e_ctl00
_ctl04_ctl08_ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_TextField"
title="Mobile Phone" />
Selecting the input-text using the title attribute is easier and will be consistently rendered by SharePoint that way anyway (assuming the list column stays the same and doesn’t get modified.)
After the masks have been applied, the SharePoint Contact form will now ensure that the inputs conform to the phone number and ZIP code format:
Input-masks in a SharePoint Contact Form
I haven’t had a chance to blog about jQuery yet but I will do this sometime next week. jQuery is a very useful and powerful JavaScript library. There are many other tricks you can do in SharePoint with jQuery and I will discus them next week.
I hope you guys enjoy Halloween tomorrow. And don’t eat too many candies!
