SharePoint Branding Issues: Calender View
Back again for a SharePoint branding issue, and this time we’ll tackle the calender. More specifically its calender views: the day and the week view. Let me first show you, how the week view should look like:
As you can see, an appointment can cover multiple hours. This way you have a graphical overview of how much time appointments will take. This, however, is how it looks like on the other MOSS master pages:
This is not what we expected. Appointments now only cover a small fragment of the time to take, while the rest stays blank. It is very confusing for the user. And some appointments seem to pointlessly be in different columns. The day view experiences the same kind of problem. What is this weird voodoo? We did not change anything to the calender, now did we?
Well, no, we didn’t. But we did change the looks of it by changing how the looks are parsed. As I already mentioned in another article a couple of weeks ago, the other MOSS master pages use a (correct) doctype declaration, while the default master page does not even contain one:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd“>
Make no mistake, this is a declaration HTML pages should contain. Otherwise, you have no clue how browsers will render the page. Internet Explorer falls back to its “quirk mode”, where everything is “kinda” allowed. Other browsers will just try to render the page. And this is what we experience in the calender views. The inner box of the appointment has a CSS property: height equals 100% to make the appointment cover the whole time slot space reserved in the table of the view. In the doctype declared version, this is only supported if all parent elements also have a CSS height equal to 100%. Of course, this is not the case for all its parents. That’s why the appointments get shortened.
Is there a solution? Well, no solutions, only workarounds, I’m afraid.
- Remove the doctype declaration from the master page. I don’t really advice it, but it can do the trick. Make sure other browsers still display the master page correctly. Future browsers can break the layout however. (this is what SharePoint did for the default.master)
- Rewrite the views. You could make the views compatible with current standards, but it’ll cost quite some time to develop.
- Have SharePoint show the default.master for the calender views. It’s an ugly workaround, as you’ll have different layouts in your site, but it works.
Once more, a very unfortunate branding issue. Aspecially, because it could have been prevented by generating correct HTML. Hopefully this kind of bugs will be resolved in future SharePoint versions. Till next time.
December 6th, 2007 at 13:03
Which workaround will you be implementing @ TVL?
December 9th, 2007 at 23:59
Well, we’ll see how they decide.. :p