This series assumes that you are familiar with the “HTML Calculated Column” .

Part I: fallback to SP 2007
Part II: edit in SharePoint Designer
Part III: deal with individual Web Parts

My current Text to HTML script, written for SharePoint 2007, works as follows:

1. find all hyperlinks (A tags) on the page
2. if a tag contains an HTML string, convert it to actual HTML
3. find all cells (TD tags) on the page
4. if a tag contains an HTML string, convert it to actual HTML

I played with some more efficient scripts, but my tests showed that there was so little to gain that it was not worth the trouble.

In SharePoint 2010, things are different: because of asynchronous updates on the page (details here), the script needs to run more often, and performance optimizations will have a significant impact. So I chose a different approach to reduce the size of the loops:

1. identify all the Web Parts on the page
2. sort them out, to separate calendar Web Parts from the others
3. for the calendar Web Parts:
   1. find all hyperlinks (A tags) in the WP
   2. if a tag contains an HTML string, convert it to actual HTML
4. for the other Web Parts:
   1. find all cells (TD tags) in the WP
   2. if a tag contains an HTML string, convert it to actual HTML
5. rinse and repeat steps 3 and 4 as needed

The script:

<script type="text/javascript">

// Christophe Humbert - Path to SharePoint

// Find all Web Parts in the page
var listWP=[],calWP=[],divs=document.getElementById("MSO_ContentTable").getElementsByTagName("div");
var count=divs.length;
for (i=0;i<count;i++) {
try {
if (divs[i].id.indexOf("WebPartWPQ")==0){
if (divs[i].innerHTML.indexOf("ViewDefault_CalendarView")>=0) {
// Calendars
calWP.push(divs[i].id);
}
else {
// Other Web Parts
listWP.push(divs[i].id);
}
}
}
catch(e){}
}

// Apply Text to HTML as needed

</script>

The question now is how to “apply the Text to HTML script as needed”. I’ll provide some suggestions in the next episodes. We’ll see in particular that the behavior of calendar views is different from other Web Parts.

A note for the jQuery fans

In jQuery, getting all the Web Parts can be done with a single selector:
$(“#MSO_ContentTable div[id^=’WebPartWPQ’]”)
What you need to understand is that the above line, although shorter than its JavaScript equivalent, will take the same time to execute. So there is no benefit from using jQuery here.