Development

Overview of User Profiles in SharePoint User profiles in SharePoint store information about users such as their name, contact information, department, manager, and other attributes. This enables personalized experiences, audiences, permissions, and more. User profiles have a default structure but can be extended with custom properties. User profile structure The default user profile contains properties…

The Problem: Request URL Length Limits When querying SharePoint lists and libraries via the REST API, it is common to use the $expand parameter to retrieve additional columns in the same call. However, when expanding people columns that contain large amounts of user profile data, the request URL can quickly become too long, resulting in…

The Problem: Limited Profile Information in Default Responses The SharePoint REST APIs provide useful profile information for users, but the default people fields returned are limited. By default, the REST responses only contain a few identifying fields like ID, Name, Email, LoginName etc. However, SharePoint stores much more user profile data like Department, Skills, Past…

Customizing SharePoint Site Definitions SharePoint provides various out-of-the-box site definitions such as Team Site, Communication Site, and Hub Site to quickly provision sites for different purposes. However, business requirements often demand customizations and enhancements to these site definitions to tailor them more closely to an organization’s needs. Feature stapling provides a method for customizing and…

The Problem of Losing Form Data A common frustration for users filling out custom forms in SharePoint is the potential to lose entered data if they navigate away from the form before explicitly saving their work. Unlike native SharePoint forms that auto-save entries to list items, custom forms built with tools like PowerApps often require…

Opening SharePoint Modal Dialogs SharePoint provides the ability to open modal dialog popups to display forms, messages, or allow user input. The main method used to open a modal dialog in SharePoint is SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(). This method opens a modal dialog popup using the provided URL and options. Some key things to note when opening SharePoint…

The Need for Custom Field Rendering Out-of-the-box field rendering options in SharePoint 2013 have limitations that can constrain solutions built on the platform. Specifically, the lack of flexibility in displaying and editing field values on forms can hamper user experiences and adoption. As a result, developers often find the need to customize how fields are…

Checking a user’s group membership in SharePoint can be a frequent yet resource-intensive operation. Every call to check Active Directory group membership results in added load on the domain controllers. When apps make repeated access check calls, the accumulated load can cause severe performance issues. Caching the results of group membership checks allows bypassing AD…

What Causes the “Sorry, apps are turned off” Error The “Sorry, apps are turned off” error typically signifies insufficient entitlements configured in the SharePoint farm to allow apps to be enabled and run properly in site collections or at the web application level. There are a few common misconfigurations that can trigger this access denied…

Efficiently Loading Large SharePoint Document Libraries As SharePoint document libraries grow to contain tens or hundreds of thousands of files, users face increasingly long load times when accessing these large libraries. The default paged loading behavior retrieves data in batches, often resulting in delays of 30 seconds or more before the library finishes populating. This…