New Master Page breaks SharePoint apps

Consider this scenario: You create a new web and add several apps. Next, you make some master page modifications and choose the “Reset All Subsites” option when applying the master page. This prompts SharePoint to reset all MasterUrl and CustomMasterUrl properties to point to the root web. Because all of our apps are running in their own App-Web (Aka sub-site) these sites are reset too. So now when are apps are rendered the master page it calling to the root web for its masterpage. This results in error because the app is not allowed to call outside of its own web. (Some scenarios allow cross-site calls).

 

To fix this we need to rewrite the app master page URL. We can do this for all apps using PowerShell.


$appWebs = (Get-SPSite -Identity <YourSiteCollectionURL> -Limit All).AllWebs | ?{$_.Url -match "<YourAppURL>"} #Your app URL should be company-app.com, etc
foreach ($app in $appWebs) {
$masterUrl = $app.ServerRelativeUrl + "/_catalogs/masterpage/Seattle.master"
$app.MasterUrl = $masterUrl
$app.Update()
}


We can now access the configuration pages within our apps.

 

{Kam}

6 Ways to help track the Successes and shortcomings of your SharePoint Site

A new SharePoint site can be a nice shiny new toy to some and ‘just another tool’ to others. Our information architecture and taxonomy determine how easy it ‘should’ be for users to find information. After all, there is a cost associated with a lack of discoverability and usability of a given SharePoint site. It is important that we are always enforcing governance to ensure the site is being used properly and we also need to be able to measure the successes and shortcomings of our sites.

 

We have a couple of tools out of the box that we can use to see how the site is being used.

Wrap Promoted Links Tiles

When you use the promoted links app in SharePoint 2013 you will notice that the default behavior is to run the tiles off the right of the screen and show paging buttons(below)

This is because the CSS class ms-promlink-body is set to a width of 10000px. Not sure why they did this but there is a quick fix for it.

Option #1 – Recommended

Add the following override to your style sheet.

.ms-promlink-body {
max-width:100%;
}

.ms-promlink-headerNav{
display: none;
}

Note: This will affect all promoted links apps.

Option #2 – Script Editor

1. Go to your Tiles.aspx view for your promoted links list.
2. Select the Gear –> Edit Page
3. Add a script editor web part to the page.
4. Add the code snippet below to fix the width.

<style type=”text/css”>

.ms-promlink-body {
max-width:100%;
}
.ms-promlink-headerNav {
display: none;
}
</style>

Note: This will only affect the current promoted links app.

Important: Because we are adding a web part to a default list view page SharePoint treats this as a modified application page. Due to this, when we view the page the Item/List tabs are missing. To get them to show we must click inside the List(Tile) view web part to activate the button in the ribbon. This can be done by clicking on some white-space within the actual web part.

Result:

 

{Kam}