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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

JQuery for Everyone: Force Checkout

Comments: 15

With browsers other than IE, users often miss the “force checkout” dialogs when they open documents. Even with IE, if the user has an older version of Office, the document opens in Read Only mode while their computer stores a cached copy in the temp files.

Unwary users then edit the file and save it thinking it will save to SharePoint when it usually just gets lost in their temp files. This script removes document links (you can configure which document extensions) and alerts users to check the document out. Once a document is checked out to the current user, the links work normally (they still need to be careful where they save it).

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function initForceCheckout(){
	var elm = "a[href$='ppt'],"+ //configure file extensions
			  "a[href$='pptx'],"+
			  "a[href$='doc'],"+
			  "a[href$='docx'],"+
			  "a[href$='xls'],"+
			  "a[href$='xlsx']";
	$(elm).each(function(i,e) {
		var str = "_"+$(e).attr("onclick");
		var arr = str.split(",");
		if (arr[0].indexOf("DispEx")!=-1 && arr[10] != arr[11]) {
			$(e).attr("href","#")
				.removeAttr("onClick")
				.addClass("ForceCheckout")
				.bind("click", function() {
					alert("You much check out this document before editing");
			});
		}
	});
}
$(function (){ //initialize the script
	initForceCheckout();
});
function ExpGroupRenderData(htmlToRender, groupName, isLoaded) {//re-write of WSS fn for groups
 var tbody=document.getElementById("tbod"+groupName+"_");
 var wrapDiv=document.createElement("DIV");
 wrapDiv.innerHTML="<TABLE><TBODY id=\"tbod"+ groupName+"_\" isLoaded=\""+isLoaded+ "\">"+htmlToRender+"</TBODY></TABLE>";
 tbody.parentNode.replaceChild(wrapDiv.firstChild.firstChild,tbody);
 initForceCheckout();
}
</script>

Paul Grenier

View all entries in this series: PaulGrenier-JQuery for Everyone»

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I recommend SharePoint resources daily on my twitter account here.

Posted by AutoSponge on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 7:00 am
Filed under Tips and Tricks · Tagged with

Please Join the Discussion

15 Responses to “JQuery for Everyone: Force Checkout”

erugalatha says:

January 21, 2009 at 9:35 am

IMHO this is going to help out a lot of people.
Cheers for making it happen Paul. :)

Reply
erugalatha says:

January 22, 2009 at 5:34 am

Suggestion/Addition:

Is there a way to modify the buttons produced on the message box instead of OK?

i.e. have a Check Out button and Cancel button. Clicking Check Out automatically performs the Check Out and opens in the appropriate application.

Reply
SevenOfNine says:

February 12, 2009 at 6:10 am

Worth to note that it will fail on grouped views.

Reply
AutoSponge says:

February 12, 2009 at 8:07 am

@SevenOfNine,

Actually, this was tested with groups.

I rewrote the ExpGroupRenderData function on the page which renders grouped data to fire the initialization again.

Are you seeing something different? Which browser?

Reply
SevenOfNine says:

February 12, 2009 at 4:04 pm

You’re right. I missed the part with the rewritten ExpGroupRenderData function completely. Well, well, it was late last night ;-)

Thanks for enlighting me…

Reply
custardcrumble says:

February 17, 2009 at 4:34 am

This looks perfect!
Please forgive my ignorance but where should I put this code?
CC

Reply
AutoSponge says:

February 17, 2009 at 8:13 am

@Custard,

For a single library, use Site Actions > Edit to put the page in edit mode. Then ‘Add a web part’ to one of the zones. Add a Content Editor Web Part. In the settings for that CEWP, open the Source Editor and paste the code there.

If you like that, start with my series on JavaScript: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=929

Reply
Adam Davidson says:

March 16, 2009 at 1:38 pm

Paul,

Looks like a great trick. I’ve got a WSS 2.0 site that I’d like to use this on, but I can’t get it to work. I suspect it needs to be on MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 to work. Any way it can be made to work for WSS 2.0?

Thanks,
Adam

Reply
AutoSponge says:

March 16, 2009 at 3:52 pm

@Adam

Thanks for the compliment. I’ve never used WSS2 so I can’t really help you. To create this, I studied the rendered source of the document library looking for a pattern near the document’s link.

The javascript call has a bunch of arguments which included the current user and the user the document is checked out to (null if not checked out).

Therefore, my logic just says arr[10] != arr[11] (if argument 10 does not equal argument 11…)

Reply
Frank says:

May 18, 2009 at 10:21 am

Do you have a ‘Screencast’ or ‘Screenshots’ for this? I’m still new at SharePoint and we are using WSS 3.0 for our hospital.
Thanks

Reply
Frank says:

May 18, 2009 at 3:02 pm

Two questions:
1. Can this work with PDFs?
2. Not all the documents and PPT slides have the ‘POPUP’. How can I fix this. We are using WSS 3.0
Thanks

Reply
AutoSponge says:

May 18, 2009 at 5:56 pm

I don’t think it’s going to work with PDFs because there’s no expected client integration.

I intended for there to NOT be a popup if the document does not require checkout or you already have it checked out. Is that the case?

Reply
AutoSponge says:

May 18, 2009 at 5:59 pm

@Frank,

BTW, I’m terrible at screencasts. It takes me 2 hours to produce 10 minutes of video. It’s not something I do often but I’m trying to get better. I’ll keep this request in mind.

Reply
sharepoint4endusers says:

March 8, 2010 at 8:19 pm

How and where to use this script?????

Reply