Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Last week I was teaching the U2U Advanced SharePoint Development course in Brussels when one of my students showed me a web part he had created. The web part showed a cool 3D chart (rendered with Adobe Flex) based on some data coming from a SharePoint list. This idea inspired me to create an addition to the SmartTools project on CodePlex: the SmartTools.Charts component. The SmartTools.Charts component contains a web part that can show charts rendered by making use of a very cool open source Silverlight control created by Visifire (since I don't have any knowledge about Adobe Flex). The web part can be configured to read data from any list or document library of that site on which it's placed. At the end of this post you can see a screenshot of the web part in action. I've created a small video as well since the charts have some fancy animations when they're shown, so you need to see it in motion! A high resolution version of that video can be download from this page (bottom right). If you'd like to try the SmartTools.Charts component, you can download a first beta version from the CodePlex site (direct link to the releases). Since this is an early beta version, things can go wrong, and breaking changes in future releases can be expected; so basically use it at your own risk (source code is included). As usual, let me know if you have any comments, remarks or feature requests.

The first part of this article showed you how you can enable jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages, so in this article let's assume jQuery is up and running in your SharePoint environment. The second part of this article will show you a couple of things that you can accomplish by making use of jQuery in SharePoint 2007. It's not my goal to write about how jQuery is working, the syntax etc, for those things I kindly refer to the tutorials that are already available.

In the first part of this article I'll talk about how you can enable the jQuery JavaScript library in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages. The second part of this article will focus on using jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages.

You probably know that if you want to make use of the fancy new .NET stuff, like ASP.NET AJAX in SharePoint 2007 sites, you have to make a bunch of modifications in the web.config of that site. You can do that the manual way, for example Mike Ammerlaan has described how you can enable ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 in SharePoint sites already a long time ago. Recently .NET 3.5 (including a new version of ASP.NET AJAX) became available, including the steps that you needed to go through to be able to enable it in SharePoint sites. You can check out Tobias Zimmergren’s post for example to get an idea.