A Quick Update

I've spent most of the last couple days working on a little JavaScript web app project that I'll do a good write-up on here in a few days. I still need to refine it and do some tweaking before I publish it. The 'Quick-n-Dirty' version is this:

Quickly and easily create and log configuration scripts for Cisco Metro Ethernet devices.

1. User inputs device variables & clicks 'submit'.
2. The app builds the config script based on the user input.
3. It also sends the variables to a SharePoint list for archival & recovery.

All the big steps are done, but like I said, there is still some bug squishing to do. Until the full post comes out, here are a couple of my lessons learned so far from this project:

• In SharePoint, it's possible to automatically submit a form using Javascript to populate the input fields based on the query string and the following code to execute the 'Submit' function already built into the form:

   var theInputs = document.getElementsByTagName("INPUT");
   var i = 0;
   var objSubmit = "";
   while (i < theInputs.length)
   {
    if (theInputs[i].id.search("Tbl_") > 0 && theInputs[i].id.search("SaveItem") > 0)
    { objSubmit = theInputs[i]; }
    i+=1;
   }
  function fFoxSubmit() // this function is specifically for submissions made in firefox/netscape browsers
  {
   var fn = objSubmit.getAttribute("onClick");
   eval(fn.substr(fn.search(";") + 1));
  }
  
   if (navigator.appName == "Netscape")
   { window.addEventListener('load', fFoxSubmit, false); }
   else { window.attachEvent('onload', objSubmit.getAttribute("onClick")); }

• The "CONCATENATE" function in SharePoint calculated columns can only handle 30 items. It took me 30 minutes of head pounding and syntax verification before I thought to see if there was a technical limitation. To work around this I broke the statement into two seperate CONCATENATE statements and CONCATENATE'd those:

  =CONCATENATE(CONCATENATE("blah",[x],"blargh",[honk],...),CONCATENATE("n",[title],"pWn3d",[u],...))