Hi, I'm Elio Struyf — an Solutions Architect passionate about creating innovative solutions and sharing knowledge with the developer community. With expertise in Microsoft 365, Azure, End-to-End testing, and Developer Tooling, and Productivity. I help teams build better software and deliver exceptional results.
Now that webhooks are supported on the beta endpoint of the Microsoft Graph, I wanted to put it to the test and see how I could leverage it in my application. For one of my hobby projects built with Node JS, I wanted to show notifications when something changed in my calendar. During the development process I stumbled on a
For a hobby project which I was creating with Node.js and Visual Studio Code, I was amazed about how powerful the Visual Studio Code has gotten in such a short time period. Most of us know how easy it is when you publish one of your web projects from Visual Studio to Azure. It is just a matter of clicks
In my previous blog post I described the process how to create all day events with the Microsoft Graph API. I used this method for synchronizing an external planning system to Office 365. This enabled our users to go to a MVC site and manually start the synchronization process. The next thing on my to-do list was to create a
Over the last couple of months I developed a calendar application that synchronized events from an external system to a user’s calendar in Office 365. For the event creation process I made use of the Microsoft Graph previous known as the Unified API which was still in beta at that time. During the beta of the Microsoft Graph API things
This article explains a quick tip how you can allow empty search queries. This functionality is necessary when you have pages on which you configured the search web parts to use predefined queries in order to show results when the page gets loaded. Note: This could be either configured in the web part itself or via a result source. If you also
If you are using content by search web part (CSWP), it might sometimes happen that no results are retrieved for a particular query. When this happens, the CSWP will by default not render any mark-up, but you can also configure the web part to show a message when no results are retrieved.
The search result web part and content by search web part share the same item result limit of a maximum of 50 items that can be shown. If you want to show more items, the only option you have out-of-the-box is using a control template that allows paging (like List with paging for the CSWP). Another approach could be to
For one of our internal Office 365 add-ins I wanted to display the user’s profile picture via the Office 365 Unified APIs. Note: At the moment there is not much documentation about the Unified API and retrieving the user’s profile picture. You could fall back on the documentation about the Outlook User Photo REST API. In my Office 365 add-in I am
In various SharePoint environments I see that clients mostly use the predefined refiners that you get from an out of the box search center. These refiners could of course help your users to find the right results, but they can always be made better. The author refiner for example can simply be more useful by adding the user his or her
For a client, my colleague and I were creating a new “who is who” functionality on their intranet via a couple search web parts. In order to show the full profile of a user we created a new page with a content by search web part that showed a single user result. This gave us more flexibility for styling the
Over the past months I received the same question a couple of times from customers and blog readers if there way to specify the number of search results per category / division / department. Their requirement was to display for example three global news articles and two news articles from the division the user belongs. The standard search web parts only
Right before my vacation I released new display templates in the SPCSR GitHub repository. These display templates can be used to visualize results as tiles. The tiles are build the same way the promoted links web part. Show image
I am pleased to announce two other events where I will be speaking in October. #SPSMuc - October 10, 2015 Munich will be something special, it will be the first time that Thomas Vochten and I will do a session together. We are going to do a session about SharePoint Search targeted for the IT Pro and Developer audience.
I am pleased to tell you that I will be speaking at two new SharePoint Saturday events in London and Barcelona. #SPSLondon - July 11, 2015 In London I will do a new session about my tips and trick for creating search display templates. Search display templates tips and tricks (lvl: 200) Everyone has its own ways on creating display templates for SharePoint. Some
This week I saw a question on StackExchange about optimizing a search page and how to get rid of the pre-loaded display templates. You can quickly check the templates that get pre-loaded by opening an OOTB SharePoint search center results page, and checking the loaded scripts via Fiddler or your browser developer tools. For a default search results page, you
When you create a display template that displays a publishing image (example: the roll-up image of a page) it might be that you used the Srch.ContentBySearch.getPictureMarkup() function of SharePoint. This function is also used in the standard display templates like for example: Item_Picture3Lines.html. This Srch.ContentBySearch.getPictureMarkup provides you the markup for rendering the image with the image rendition of your choice. The
In my session about improving your SharePoint search experiences that I presented at SPSBE and SPSParis, I discussed various tips and tricks to improve the search experience for a user. One of these tips was about visualizing other search keyword combinations. One of the problems users may experience is that they do not know which keywords to enter for their search
Back in December 2013 I wrote an article in which I explained how you could dynamically switch the result source with a search query keyword. Note: You can find the article over here - Dynamically changing the result source in a SharePoint 2013 search center. The past few weeks I have got the same question a couple of times how to make
A few weeks ago a customer asked me if it was possible to create a display template which visualizes article results according to the page layout that got used. This customer has various types of articles and page layouts set up in their environment. The display template was required for the main roll-up of the articles and users had to
Last week I went to the SharePoint Evolution Conference, which was a great event. At the conference I attended one of Andrew Connell’s sessions about a deep dive into the SharePoint REST API. During Andrew’s session he explained the REST API batching functionality which is at the moment only available in SharePoint Online / Office 365. The batching functionality allows
I am pleased to tell you that I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Paris on May, 30th. This event is organised by Benoit Jester, Patrick Guimonet, and Gokan Ozcifci. These guys already did an amazing job with their personalized speaker announcements and the agenda they put together. Show
Yesterday I received the email from Microsoft. Show image MVP email I am very happy and honored to have received this MVP award from Microsoft. My main community contributions the past years were of course
Today I was creating my session for SharePoint Saturday Belgium and Paris. For my demo’s I prepared a couple of display templates that were created on Office 365 / SharePoint Online. To be sure that I had a backup plan, I moved all these display templates to my development environment on-premises. The first thing I got after I configured the web
One of the handiest features that were added to a list or library is the in-place searchbox. The in-place searchbox allows you to quickly search for items or documents while staying in the list or library context (in previous versions you were redirected to a search page). When you have used this list or library searchbox, you may have experienced
Most of the SharePoint environments these days make use of managed metadata. If you do so and want to use the managed properties within your search web parts, you could experience some strange behaviour when sorting your results based on these managed metadata properties. When using the auto-created managed properties linked to your managed metadata column for sorting, a disorder
Show image SharePoint Saturday Belgium The BIWUG board is proud to announce the fifth edition of SharePoint Saturday Belgium. The event takes place on Saturday April 18th and will be held at a new venue:
When working in Office 365 / SharePoint on-premises you probably already used Office Web Apps (OWA) to create or modify your documents. The power of OWA is also leveraged inside a SharePoint Search Center to show the content of the document inside the hover panel. Show image
For one of my clients I investigated the possibility to include result filtering or refinement into a display template for the Content Search Web Part. The reason to include this filtering functionality into a display template is to make it easier to fit into the corporate design. Another reason is to minimum the amount of display templates that get loaded
One of the interesting things about display templates is that you can add managed property mappings that can be managed in the SharePoint UI. This allows users to define which properties they want to use in their templates. Show image
A question that has been asked to me a couple of times is if it would be possible to add some settings to the Content by Search Web Part which can be leveraged inside the display templates. This could be handy when you want to develop display templates for which you want to be able to change the rendering based
A lot of users want to get an overview of the latest items of a list or library. Some users want to include a link to the list or library from which the items were retrieved. As this link from the search results location may vary, you should not hard code the link back to the item or control template. Solution The
When you are using the Content Search Web Part, you have by default a control template list with paging available. Now this template only shows left and right buttons to navigate to the next or previous page: Show image
In the previous blog post I showed you how to create a result block with Office Graph suggestions. This was all done by three display templates. In this blog post I will describe in more detail what each of these templates does, and how I achieved it. Note: here is a link to the previous post: Creating a result block that
There are already a various blog posts that show the power and value of Office Graph / Delve for your organisation, but not everyone will go to the Delve page to find their results. You also have your SharePoint search center were a lot of your users will go through to find their documents because they are used doing it
Some time ago I wrote a blog post series about creating your own search refiners for SharePoint 2013. Note: here you can find the posts - Creating Custom Refiner Control Display Templates for SharePoint 2013. A couple of persons have asked me how they could implement a date picker to the range search refiner control I created in the last post. I have
Last Friday there was a discussion on Twitter about a problem with the Slider with bar graph refiner. The problem is that the refiner does not work properly when you use custom date and time managed properties. When you would use a custom date and time managed property, you get the following output:
A couple of weeks ago somebody asked me if it was possible to create an accordion template from the grouping display template. Note: here is the original grouping template post - Grouping search results with display templates for the CSWP For these templates I made use of jQuery UI to get the accordion styling on the template. Once I had the accordion
A question was asked a while ago on StackExchange by a person with whom I worked together at one of my clients. He asked if it was possible to get the list or library name via a managed property so that it can be used in a display template. The problem is that there is not a property that has this
When creating display templates it is sometimes required to load additional script and/or CSS files. These files can easily be referenced in a display template with the following functions: $includeScript $includeLanguageScript $includeCSS Now there is a problem when using these $include functions. The problem is that the function loads your referenced files asynchronously. So that means that if you need to call a function
In this post I tell you my 10 tips and tricks that could help you when creating your display templates. Tip 1: only do your changes in the HTML files, except if you know what you are doing Best is to do your changes in the HTML version of the display template, otherwise you could end up with a corrupt JavaScript file.
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