This is another post in Paul Galvin’s on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint. If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

UPDATE (already!): I did think of a better way to locate the <TR> tag I want to hide and wrote about it here.  You may still find this article interesting anyway so I’m leavnig it up.

I want to hide a text field, “Hide Me!” as shown:

The following jQuery does the trick for me:

      <script type="text/javascript">
      $(function() {
      $('input[title=Hide Me!]').parent().parent().parent().hide();
      });
      </script>
  

The code is saying, “find me all input fields whose title = Hide Me!.  Then, get its parent and then next parent and the *next* parent (phew!) and invoke the hide() method on that thing, whatever it happens to be.

I figured out that parent structure by viewing the HTML for the form that SharePoint created as shown:

      <TR>
      <TD nowrap="true" valign="top" width="190px" class="ms-formlabel">
      <H3 class="ms-standardheader">
      <nobr>Hide Me!</nobr>
      </H3>
      </TD>
      <TD valign="top" class="ms-formbody" width="400px">
        <!-- FieldName="Hide Me!"
        FieldInternalName="Hide_x0020_Me_x0021_"
        FieldType="SPFieldText"
        -->
        <span dir="none">
        <input
		name="ctl00$m$g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e$ctl00$ctl04$ctl02$ctl00$ctl00$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$TextField"
		type="text"
        maxlength="255"
        id="ctl00_m_g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e_ctl00_ctl04_ctl02_ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_TextField"
        title="Hide Me!"
        class="ms-long" />
        <br>
        </span>
        </td>
  </tr>

This picture shows the same, but marked up with the parents:

The first parent (1) is a span tag.  Span’s parent (2) is a TD tag and then finally we get to the real parent I want to hide (3) which is the TR tag itself.

This is a pretty terrible approach I think because it’s extremely dependent on the very specific structure of this form.  When SharePoint 2010 comes out, this whole structure could change and break this approach.  What I really want to do is craft a jQuery selector that is along the lines of “find me all the TR’s (and only TR tags) that have somewhere in their child elements an input field whose title = Hide Me!”.  I starting from the bottom and moving up.  Assuming I figure this out, I’ll post an updated “quick and easy’ post.

Paul Galvin, Microsoft MVP – SharePoint
Web site: Paul Galvin’s SharePoint Space

Paul is a Solutions Architect currently working most closely with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. He was recently awarded Microsoft MVP – SharePoint status for his work with the SharePoint community.