With the upcoming release of NetAdvantage for SharePoint, we are show casing the samples before you could download the trial or buy the new volume release. We are presenting two major features: custom map projections and a completely new Grid web part.

The Grid Web Part

This release our team has been working hard to deliver the HTML5 / jQuery Grid experience into SharePoint. The Infragistics SharePoint Grid is able to connect to a SharePoint list or External Content Type. Your users can manipulate the data in various ways including grouping, sorting, inline editing and more.

You can also take the full advantage of your SharePoint list view settings - the Grid web part inherits all kind of applicable settings from your list view. For example, you have setup a list view which is grouping records by a certain criteria, when selecting this list view for a data source in the Grid Interaction Design Editor all settings are transferred inside your grid. You can preview the result instantaneously before applying the change.

The Grid also allows you add any additional settings - for example you might want to pre-filter the result, using the pre-filter feature. In that case the Grid will send a query to the SharePoint list view requesting just the records which fall under the given criteria.

Setting Grid Pre-filter in the Grid Editor

Another feature which is interesting to note is the possibility to re-arrange the columns which come from the list view. As long as you have design access to your web application you just need to drag and drop the columns in the desired order.

Re-arranging the Grid columns in the Grid Editor

All these features seems nice, but what about your user experience? As long as you have setup your Grid properly, you can provide your users to apply different operations such as data grouping, filtering, or sorting. All these operations are applied just client-side, meaning that the rest of the users seeing the grid instance will not see the changes applied by another user. However, there is this thing called

Inline Data Editing

which allows users with sufficient permissions to the list (the one used as a data source in the Grid) to edit records inline, taking advantage of the specific editor providers for date/time, multiline text, number, drop-down list. In this case, the changes are saved in the SharePoint list record and when another user sees the Grid, a certain record might already be changed.

Given the needed permissions, your users can edit SharePoint list records easily with the Inline Data Editing feature

You can explore the new Grid web part in its samples site at http://sharepoint.infragistics.com/gridWebPart/

Custom Map Projections

For some cases a cartographer has decided to create a shapefile in a certain projection - Berhmann, Equirectangular, Mercator, etc. The Map web part could now be configured to use a projection for the whole map, or just for a single shapefile layer. The settings allow you to configure various parameters for your coordinate system such scale unit, false easting, false northing and more.

Miller 37 coordinate system parameters

We have added samples for this new feature both as an end-viewer (which could be explored in the Map samples at Map Projection page) and as a designer. If you are a designer, or a web application administrator, you might want to see how the new feature works playing with the updated Map Interaction Design Editor sample where we have added a new shapefile which could be selected and configured with the different projections.

There is a new shapefile in the Map Interactive Design Editor which requires custom coordinate system to be viewed properly

The New Samples

As you have probably already noticed, we have overhauled the entire samples site for the NetAdvantege for SharePoint web parts. We believe that it is much easier to navigate or find the content that you want.

So, when does the NetAdvantage for SharePoint 2012 Volume 1 come out? It will be tomorrow (6th of June). Along with the release of the new features and the Grid web part, you will find various bug fixes for the old web parts, thoroughly described in the Release Notes.

Also, the new release comes with a very thorough documentation describing the Map projection and the Grid web part. We have added a whole Reference section where you will be able to easily access the different web part properties when configuring your web parts. It will be available at http://www.infragistics.com/support/documentation.aspx#OnlineDocumentation