Structural Navigation vs Managed Navigation in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post we are going to learn about the navigation options present in SharePoint Online.

Below are the two main out of the box navigation options in SharePoint
1) Structured Navigation
2) Managed Navigation

What is Structured Navigation?
This is SharePoint out of the box navigation used by default and it is based on the site structure we define for our portal.

Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages using Structured Navigation.

PROS	CONS
Navigation will be updated automatically whenever Sites are added. Easy to configure. Pages are automatically added. Security trimmed, so if a user doesn’t have access to a link it will not appear in the top navigation.	Slower performance with complex navigation structure having more than 10 levels. URLs are not friendly and can be hard to memorize. Homepages belonging to structured navigation links do not appear in search when you type a search term. Cannot tag a structured navigation link to a document that it may relate to.

What is a Managed Metadata Navigation?

Managed Metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that we can define, and then use as attributes. It uses a dedicated term set for site navigation and the terms correspond to the friendly URL segment created.

Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages using Managed Navigation

PROS	CONS
Easy to maintain. Significantly faster page loads. Pages with term show up in search results. Documents tagged with navigation term show up in search results along with homepage of term. Friendly URLs that are easy to remember. Easy to maintain with more options to target search. Pages are automatically added.	Not security trimmed, so if a user doesn’t have access to a link in the top navigation they will still see it but can’t get to it. Sites are not automatically added. Cannot be used across site collections.

Hope this helps...

How to create thumbnail/preview of any document or Image or Video in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post, we are going to learn how to generate a thumbnail/preview of any Document or Video or Image in SharePoint.

Recently I came across a requirement to show some document links on a page but the links should be the thumbnail of the document instead of a plain text(document title). Please find the below approach I followed to achieve this.

getpreview.ashx is a http handler used to generate thumbnail/preview of any document(word,pdf, ppt etc.,), Image and Video which resides in SharePoint.

If you observe in SharePoint search results, when we mouse over on the search results we get a preview of that item. This is actually happening through http handler getpreview.ashx

This handler expects a parameter called “path” which expects absolute path of the doc/image/video. Please find the below sample URLs to generate the thumbnail.

Image:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

Document:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/Document/abcd.doc

Video:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/videos/abcd.mp4

This handler has also expects a parameter called “resolution” which has a predefined values 1, 2, 3 etc., for different resolutions of previews/Thumbnails. Please find the below sample URLs with different resolutions

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?resolution=1&path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?resolution=2&path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

Hope this helps…

RELATED POST: Image Renditions in SharePoint 2013

How to use Image Renditions in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post we are going to learn What are the Image Renditions and how we can use it in SharePoint.

Image renditions helps to display a single image into various sizes based on our needs. Apart from choosing size, it also allows you to crop the image while adding it to the publishing page.

So based on our needs, we can display abcd.jpg as Logo, Banner and Thumbnail etc., This technique helps in reducing the size of the file that is downloaded to the client, which then improves site performance. You can find some of the ways to improve SharePoint site speed and performance here.

The other advantage if you notice, we need not to create different sized images i.e., one for logo, one for thumbnail etc.,. With Image renditions we can display a single image into multiple sizes.

Below are the prerequisites for using Image Renditions 

•  Publishing Site
• BLOB Caching enabled(Follow this link on how to configure BLOB cache and its uses)

Please find the below steps on how we can configure Image Renditions.

1.     Go to the top-level site of the publishing site collection.

2.    Choose the Settings icon. On the Site Settings page, in the Look and Feel section,  choose Image Renditions.

3.    This will show you list of available Image Renditions available on this site. We can  modify the existing one, Or we can even create our own based on required dimensions.

          4.       ID indicates the RenditionID. We will be using this RenditionID as a parameter to                       specify the dimensions of an image we need.

         5.       If we want to construct image URL directly from the RenditionID, we just need to                  add it as a  Query String.

Examples: If we want display abcd.jpg as 100*100 on a page, then my image source URL will be “abcd.jpg?RenditionID=1”

If we want display abcd.jpg as 200*200 on a page, then my imgage source URL will be “abcd.jpg?RenditionID=2”

        6.       If we want to insert the image in the page content then follow the below steps. 

a)     Edit the page and place the cursor in the Page Content field.

b)    From the Ribbon Insert tab, choose Picture, and then choose From    SharePoint.

c)     Select the image that you want to add to the page and then choose Insert. The image will be displayed at full size.

d)    Next on the Design tab, in the Select group, choose Pick Rendition, and then select an  image rendition whichever required. That’s it, the image will display according to the size  specified for the image rendition.

Hope this helps... 

What is a BLOB cache in SharePoint and how to use it?

Hi Friends,

In this article, we are going to learn what is a BLOB cache and how to configure it.

The term BLOB means Binary Large Objects. BLOB cache is one of the disk-based caching techniques used in the SharePoint applications which has large amounts of Media content (Video, Audio and Images etc.,) and heavy user traffic.

So basically this method is used to improve the performance of a SharePoint Application. You can also find some of the other SharePoint performance improvement techniques here.

Disk-based caching techniques are extremely fast which eliminates the need for database round trips. BLOBs are retrieved from the database once and stored on the Web client(WFE server). Further requests are served from the cache and trimmed based on security.

Note: If you are using Image Renditions in the application, then BLOB Cache is the pre-requisite.

We can enable/disable the BLOB cache by modifying the web.config file of the SharePoint web application.
By Default, BLOB cache is disabled. Below is how it looks like.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false" />

- Location is the directory where the cached files will be stored.
- Path specifies which files(Ex: mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg) are cached based on the file extension.
- maxSize is the maximum allowable size of the disk-based cache in gigabytes.

- enabled is a Boolean that disables or enables the cache.

To turn ON the BLOB, just make the property enabled as true as shown below.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="true" />

Note : change the location attribute to specify a directory that has enough space to accommodate the cache size.


Hope this helps...

What is the difference between Local Storage and Cookies

Hi Friends,

In this post we are going to talk about when to use Local storage and Cookies.

To begin with, this is an extremely broad scope question, and a lot of pros/cons will be contextual to the situation.

Please find the below differences.

Local Storage	Cookies
Good to store large amount of data, up to 4MB	Good for small amount of data. Cookies give you a limit of 4096 bytes (4095, actually) per cookie
Local Storage allow you to store JavaScript primitives but not Objects or Arrays (it is possible to JSON serialize them to store them using the APIs)	Cookies only allow you to store strings
Local storage data is not sent to the server on every request (HTTP header) as it is purely at the client side	All data is transferred to and from server, so bandwidth is consumed on every request
It stores data with no expiration date, and gets cleared only through JavaScript, or clearing the Browser Cache / Locally Stored Data	Can specify timeout period so that cookies data are removed from browser
Local storage stores the data in the form of key and value
Not supported by anything before: IE 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5, iOS 2.0, Android 2.0 local storage can only be read client-side

Hope this helps...

When to use ScriptLink in SharePoint 2013

Hi Folks,

Some times we will run into situations where our custom js file should load only after the page is ready.

In this kind of scenario's, best thing to use is ScriptLink.

ScriptLink have the ability to specify, when we want the script to load asynchronously after the page is ready. By Default, the ScriptLink will always look for the scripts present in /_LAYOUTS/1033 folder.

<SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="MyCustomJS.js" Defer="true" runat="server"></SharePoint:ScriptLink>

MyCustom.js should be present in /_LAYOUTS/1033 folder, if not we will get a SharePoint Error screen.

If you set the "Localizable" property of the ScriptLink to false, you can also reference files outside of /_LAYOUTS/1033/ and just put your path to the "Name" property

<SharePoint:ScriptLink Language="javascript" Localizable="false" Name="/_layouts/JS/MyCustomJS.js" runat="server"></SharePoint:ScriptLink>

With the above approaches, we can load the page first and then load the script file.

Note: Using Defer="False" is basically the same as loading the script with the usual method as below.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/_layouts/1033/MyCustomJS.js"></script>


Hope this helps...

Why Javascript works only after launching developer tool bar in IE once

Hi Friends,

This post basically talks about the strange experience which I faced in one of the applications.

Problem Statement:
In Internet Explorer, the Javascript/jQuery is not working until I open the IE Tool bar once.


Solution:
After multiple trial and errors, what I observed is, it's because of the console.log present in my jQuery file.

The console object will only be activated when the IE Dev Toolbar is opened. Prior to that, calling the console object will result as undefined. After the toolbar has been opened, the console will exist (even if the toolbar is subsequently closed), so your console calls will then work.


Hence make sure to remove any Console entries from the JS file during the roll-out of the application.


Hope this helps...