Deleting SharePoint Online Site Collection Programatically

Last week, I got a requirement, where I need to delete some 300+ SPO site collections. Its a tedious process to delete SPO SC manually by going to Site Settings page and click on the link "Delete site".

So I thought is there any better way to delete the SPO site collections programmatically. There is no CSOM api, where we can leverage to delete the Site Collections and one of my colleague asked me to try using HTTPWebRequest approach

Here are the high level steps that he suggested me to do:

1. For one Site Collection, go to site settings page and click on "Delete site" link
2. Once you are on that page, for the delete button click event, do the fiddler trace and capture the all the actions that fiddler is doing for that operation
3. Mimic the same using C# code

I followed the same approach that he has suggested and I am able to delete the SPO site collection

Here are the important things that needs to be remembered when doing this operation

1. First we need to authenticate using SharePoint Online
2. Get Authenticated cookie to avoid redirects
3. Set appropriate request headers
4. Set appropriate POST parameters and url encode the same

Deleting a site collection using Http approach is a three step process:

1. Authenticate using SPO credentials and get the authenticate cookie for the site collection that needs to be deleted
2. Need to get post parameters such as form digest, view state, event target, event validation etc
3. Using the SPO credentials and using the post parameters, created another http web request object that will delete the site collections

Authenticating to SharePoint online

To authenticate to SharePoint online, we need SharePoint client dll's. Refer the following SharePoint client side dlls

1. Microsoft.SharePoint.Client
2. Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime

The below method is used to authenticate the user using SPO credentials



Getting Authentication Cookie

After authentication, we need to get authenticated cookie for the site collection, that needs to be deleted

The below code is used to get authenticated cookie



We need to add the cookie that got generated to the CookieContainer class, which will be added to the HTTPWebRequest class

Setting up the HttpWebRequest instance

The below code will show how to create HttpWebRequest class and how to pass SPO credentials and how to setup the CookieContainer that has been discussed above



The url for deleting the site collection will be: "site collection url"/_layouts/15/deleteweb.aspx.

For ex: https://your tenant/teams/sitecollectionname/_layouts/15/deleteweb.aspx

For the Http Web Request class, we need to set the following properties. This information we got from the fiddler trace

Method = "POST"
ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; BRI/2; InfoPath.3)";

Apart from setting the properties, we also need to set some form parameters, the same form parameters that "Delete" button will set on the "deleteweb.aspx"

These form parameters we can get from the fiddler trace

1. __REQUESTDIGEST
2. __VIEWSTATE
3. __EVENTVALIDATION
4. __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR
5. SideBySideToken

In order to get the above form parameters, first we need to get the html source for the deleteweb.aspx and from that html source, we need to scrap the html source to get the above values.

I have written two functions, first function will return the html source and the second function will parse the html source and will get the desired values as discussed above





The below code will show to use the above two methods and set the post parameters for the http web request class



Setting the post data and pass that post data to the web request class



__EVENTTARGET has been hard coded to "ctl00$PlaceHolderMain$ctl07$RptControls$BtnDelete" which we got from the fiddler trace and this can be used as is until unless Microsoft does not change the button name and position in the deleteweb.aspx

The below part of post data has been hard coded which I copied directly from the fiddler trace. Convert the string post data to byte array and pass that information to the request object




 The final step is to get the HttpWebResponse for the http web request that has been created above




If the response string contains, "Working on it", then we can assume that site has been deleted
 

Uploading multiple attachments to the lists using JSOM

In the previous blog post, we have seen how to attach a single file to the list item

In this blog post we will see how we can attach multiple attachments to a list item using JSOM. The following code will work in both SharePoint hosted apps and regular SPO web applications

The following technologies are referred/used in  the blog post

1. jquery.multifile.js
2. jquery
3. SPO client side libraries

Not much information is available in the internet to attach multiple files to the list items.

In your custom form, where you want to attach multiple files, add the following html tags which will facilitate the user to attach multiple files to the list item

As part of this post, we assume that, we have list called "MyList" and in that list we have two list columns called "FirstName" and "LastName"

When we insert data to this list, we also attach multiple list items. The below code snippet will show the simple html that has been created for the user to insert data into the list called "MyList"



As you can see in the above code snippet, I have two html text boxes for FirstName and LastName and a file input control.

To facilitate multi file upload control, I am leveraging "jquery.multifile.js" plugin. If we don't use that plugin, the user will select only one input file for upload

When the user selects multiple files, here is how the UI looks like

 

As you can, with the help of jquery plug in, we can select multiple files. The complete UI will look like this

I also have a submit button and on click of that button, I want to insert a new list item as well as attach as the files that user has selected

On click of btnSubmit, all the files that are selected by the user will be attached to the list item.

Here is the code snippet for the btnSubmit click event. I have written this click event in the jquery document load function



As a first step, loop all the attachments the user as selected and push that information into some javascript array. That javascript array function will just have the file information and not the contents of that file



Create another JSON array, to hold all the values the user has entered such as first name, last name etc. and including the file array that has been created above

data.push({"FirstName": $("#txtFirstName").val().trim(), "LastName": $("#txtLastName").val().trim(), "Files": fileArray});

After this, I have written some function will insert list item also attach the list items also



I am using regular JSOM code for creating the list items. Since attachments has to be inserted  to the newly created item, I need to know the ID to which I need to insert the attachments

So, first I will insert/create the data, get the list id and to that list id, we need to insert attachments


After the getting the list id, I will loop with all the attachments the user has selected. I wont resolve the function, till I insert all the list attachments. If all the attachments are inserted, I will resolve the function

loopFileUpload function need to called recursively till all the list attachments are inserted



As you can see in the above function, loopFileUpload has been called recursively till all the list attachments are inserted

With in the loopFileUpload function, I am calling another function called uploadFile which will associate the list attachment to the id that has been passed to that function



Within the uploadFile function, I am calling another function called, getFileBuffer, will will read the actual contents of the file and pass that information to uploadFile function

We are using REST based approach for inserting the list attachments as REST will allow to upload upto 2 GB of file

Here is the url that needs to be used to access the list item id to which we need to insert the list attachment




Here is the complete source code of the page that I used for this blog post



Here is the snapshot of the list item that got created using this code with multiple attachments
 

Opening a Page as modal window using JSOM in SharePoint 2013

There are many scenarios where we need to open custom pages or OOTB pages in a pop up. SharePoint provides an API to open the pages in pop up and in this post we will see how we can achieve the same using on the client side using JSOM

We will explore the following methods from the SharePoint 2013 client side library which will help us in opening the page as a dialog.

We will consider the following scenario when opening the page as a dialog:

• How to open the page in a dialog
• How to pass data to the dialog page
• How to return parameters or data back to the calling page from the dialog page

First we will see how to open the page in a dialog window. In order to open the page in a dialog, first we need to set the dialog window properties such as

• Dialog Window Title
• URL of the page to be shown in dialog window
• Width and height
• Allow dialog to maximize
• Allow dialog to close
• Need callback from the dialog window to the parent window
• Data for the dialog window that needs to be passed from the parent window

So, I have written a function in javascript with those parameters that can be called from the parent window. The below JavaScript code will show that information



We have written a function called openInDialog which can be called from the Parent page and to this method we are passing all the parameters such as title, width, height etc. that discussed above

Then we have created a variable called options which has to be a JSON object that needs to be passed to the SharePoint JavaScript function which we will discuss later



Ensure that you use the same key names in the options variable such as args, showClose, allowMaximize etc

Its always better to pass data in JSON format to the modal window

If we need callback from the dialog window, we need to set a property called dialogReturnValueCallback. To that property, we need to set a custom call back function that will be called when the user closes the dialog window



Here the closeDialogCallBack is a custom callback function that will be called when the user closes the dialog window. We will explore this custom callback function later in this post

To open the page in a dialog, we need to call a sharepoint function called showModalDialog which is defined in the namespace SP.UI.ModalDialog and this name space is present in the JS file sp.ui.dialog.js



To showModalDialog function, we are passing options as a parameter which we have created above

In the dialog window, we can access the data that is passed from the parent window as follows



dialogArgs contains the data that is passed from the parent window
Once the business is completed in the dialog window, the user will press OK or Cancel button in the dialog window.

Before clicking on OK or Cancel button, we need to prepare data that needs to be passed to the parent window. We will see how to prepare the data that needs to be passed to the parent windows



In the above code, we have created a javascript array and to this javascript array we are setting some data and we want to send this data to the parent window and the parent window can take some action based on the data that is sent from the dialog

There are two actions that can be done in the pop up either OK or Cancel. Here are the SharePoint functions for OK and Cancel click events

When the user click on "OK" button, we can call the below SharePoint function
 
SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.OK, popData);

When the user click on "Cancel" button, we can call the below SharePoint function

SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel, popData);

 As you can see, we are passing popData javascript array to both ok and cancel button.

 commonModalDialogClose sharepoint function internally calls the callback function that we discussed earlier in this post.

In our case we have created a call back function called closeDialogCallBack and this will be called when we close the pop up


 

New Custom Styles and new bulleted styles to SharePoint 2013 Rich Text Editor

By default SharePoint 2013 RTE provides two bulleted styles such as bullets and numbers as shown below


We can add new styles to support new bulleted styles and for this we need to extend the styles that comes with SharePoint 2013.

In one of my previous post, I have explained how to add new table styles. Here is the URL for the same.

In this pose we will see how we can extend styles and elements of SharePoint 2013 styles so that we can add our own styles

There are two sections in Styles in RTE for SharePoint 2013 called

1. Page Elements
2. Text Styles

First we will see the difference between Page Elements and Text Styles

Page Elements:

Page elements: Page elements are HTML elements such as Span, H1 to H6 etc. This will apply styles to particular html elements.

To add new page element styles we need to use the below syntax

elementName.ms-rteElement-yourName

Here elementName is any html element as explained above. For elements, we need to extend ms-rteElement

Text Styles:

This will allow to change styles for the text portion. For ex: I have a text called: "SharePoint 2013 has great features when compared to SharePoint 2010". I wanted to highlight both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 to different styles and in this scenario we will be using text styles where we can apply different styles to the text

ms-rteStyle-yourName

For styles we need to extend ms-rteStyle.

The below steps we will see how we can create new styles and elements. For the elements we will see how we can add new bulleted styles and for styles we will see how we can add new text styles


Steps:

1. Create a new CSS file called RteStyles.css and in that css we will create one CSS styles for text style and another CSS style for elements where we will add new bulleted style for exclamation (!) and section (§) as shown below


We also  build another style for text, where we will highlight the text red in color and we will make the text bold as shown below

RTE Element Styles



In the above RTE element styles, we are trying to add styles to html element h6. We have given the value to -ms-name as "LSW Glyphs Exclamation". A element style will appear in the element section of the RTE Styles as shown  below

We also need to specify -ms-element to true otherwise the new element style will not appear

As you can see, a new styles as been added for exclamation. If you select that styles, a new exclamation will be added at the start of the text. For getting the exclamation we added a glyph style called "\0021".

See the below url for some of the glyphs styles:

http://css-tricks.com/snippets/html/glyphs/

For getting new bulleted styles, we shouldn't use any of the existing html elements. So I have used new elements such as h7, h8 etc. If we use existing html elements such as h1 to h7 or Para tag or Span tag, we wont get bulleted functionality
 
So, to get bulleted functionality, I have used new  elements such as h7 and h8 for exclamation and section bulleted lists. See the below styles for the same



As you can see above, we have added two element styles for h7 and h8 to get new bulleted styles for exclamation and section. See the below image for the same

 

 

 

As you can see in the above figure, two new RTE element styles for h7 and h8 tags as been added

The newly created styles should be added to the master page



Now where ever rich custom editors has been used such as "Publishing Html Fields" or "Content Editor Web parts", the new RTE styles will be seen

For Text styles, we need to follow the same procedure as we followed for elements. Instead of rteElement, we need to specify rteStyles.

Since rteStyles will act on the text portion, no need to specify any html tags before rteStyles.

The signature to extend rteStyles are show below



As you can see in the above, we created rteStyle with styleName and this name can be replaced with your own style name

Also, I have given -ms-name as "New Style" and this name will appear in the RTE styles as shown below 

As seen above, a new text style with the name "New Style" will appear in the Text Styles window

Select some text in the RTE editor and you select the above mentioned styles, then the selected text will have that styles(Text will appear as bold and red color will be applied)