How to make the 'Description' field mandatory for SharePoint 2010 site creation - Part 1

Hi all,

This is my first blog post, and I hope I can help someone out with it! If anyone reads this please comment to let me know your thoughts or any suggestions for improvement.

The Business Problem

I have been developing a solution for a client that involves site creation through a form. I am personally not a fan of this approach but the client had their justifications for this and insisted on this approach. Because the site is create by filling in a list form, the description field could be made mandatory so that all sites had a description. However, I noted that if someone creates a subsite of this using the SharePoint UI then "description" will no longer be mandatory. It was very important for the client to have a description for each site because the sites were being displayed in search results and the description was very important for this.

SharePoint provides no way (that I know of, or could find in research) of making this mandatory so I set out looking at the various options. The first was to stop users creating subsites, so that all sites are created using the form, and that was very quickly scrapped as an option! The first obstacle in making the "description" field mandatory is that there are two ways to create a new site. First is the _layouts/newsbweb.aspx application page and the second is the Silverlight dialog that allows you to create libraries, sites, pages, etc. Neither of these can be modified (if you want to stay within support limitations) so we need to get around these somehow. After spending a bit of time researching the issue I came up with the following two solutions and presented them to my client:

1. Create an event receiver that cancels any new site requests if the description field is null
   
   You can create an event receiver that fires when a new web is being provisioned. The event receiver can look to see if the description field is filled out and if it is not, it will cancel the request and direct the user to a custom error page explaining why the site creation was cancelled
   
   This option is the simplest and requires least development time, but is not ideal. This is because when the user creates the site they will not know that description is mandatory and therefore a poor user experience would be provided, even though the solution would be achieved.
2. Direct all site creation through a custom application page that ensures description is mandatory
   
   The Silverlight dialog can not be modified and therefore needs to be removed from the user journey. If all sites are created using a single application page that we control then we can easily ensure that all sites have a description.
   
   This site requires a bit more development time and the downside to this is that you lose the nice Silverlight control that Microsoft has developed and some people like. Personally I do not see this as a big loss. An additional downside to this method is that there are a number of different ways to create a SharePoint site. We must find all these different pathways and ensure that each is taken into account. I will explain more below

The client chose method 2. The additional development time, and more complicated solution were preferred to a solution where the user journey was not clear. 

How I did it...

The first thing that I needed to do was create a custom application page that would create a new site and check that the Description field was not left empty. The non-silverlight method of creating a sub-site is an application page called newsbweb.aspx which can be found in the 14/TEMPLATE/layouts/ folder. I copied this page and called is newsbweb2.aspx and kept it in the layouts folder. 

*NOTE* deploying files to this folder is not recommended, especially if you have more than on Web Front End server. I took this method only for development purposes and later packaged the files using Visual Studio (more on that later)

Once I had my own copy of the page I knew the next step was to add Javascript validation to the Description field. The input field ID is ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_idTitleDescSection_ctl01_TxtCreateSubwebDescription and once I had that I placed the following javascript in the page <head> tag. 

<script type="text/javascript">
    function CheckDescriptionPopulated() 
    {
        if (document.getElementById('ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_idTitleDescSection_ctl01_TxtCreateSubwebDescription').value == "") {
            alert("'Description' field can't be empty.");
        }
     
    }
</script>

This Javascript, I knew, would validate the field but I was not sure how to call it. I am by no means an expert in ASP but it seemed to me that the ASP buttons could not be modified easily to allow me to call my javacript. I have included the markup for the button section below for reference.

<wssuc:ButtonSection TopButtons="true" BottomSpacing="5" ShowSectionLine="false" runat="server">
<Template_Buttons>
<asp:Button UseSubmitBehavior="false" runat="server" class="ms-ButtonHeightWidth" OnClick="BtnCreateSubweb_Click" Text="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_createbutton_text%>" id="BtnCreateSubwebTop" AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_createbutton_accesskey%>"/>
</Template_Buttons>
</wssuc:ButtonSection>

I therefore decided to create my own buttons and hide the existing buttons (you cannot remove them as the page will throw an asp error). So I created my own buttons that looked exactly the same and called my Javascript using the new buttons. I put the new buttons in a <tr> because the whole page is basically one big table and I wanted my new page to look as close as possible to the old page. Markup below.


<tr>
<td>
</td>
<td>
<input type="button" class="ms-ButtonHeightWidth" value="Create" onclick="CheckDescriptionPopulated()" />
<input type="button" class="ms-ButtonHeightWidth" value="Cancel" onclick="goBack()" />
</td>
</tr>

Success! The new button validates the field... But it doesn't create a site... To make sure a site gets created, I looked at the "Create" button as it appears in the IE developer toolbar and noticed that the button calls a bit of javascript to create the site. So I added this to my function, so that it is only called AFTER the description has been validated. So my javascript now looks like this.

<script type="text/javascript">

    function CheckDescriptionPopulated() {
        if (document.getElementById('ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_idTitleDescSection_ctl01_TxtCreateSubwebDescription').value == "") {
            alert("'Description' field can't be empty.");
        }

        else {
            WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions(new WebForm_PostBackOptions("ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$ctl00$RptControls$BtnCreateSubwebTop", "", true, "", "", false, true))
        }
    }
</script>

Super Success! My form now validates the description field and if successful it creates the site! All I need to do now in order to finish the page off is hide the old buttons using css, and do a bit of styling on my new buttons to put them back in the same place as the old buttons and make sure they look the same as the old ones.

Now that I have a working application page, the next part is to make sure that everyone is forced to use it, and package the whole thing up nicely in a .wsp release. I will post again with the next part.

Tal