Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

It’s hard to explain what I mean in words so here is a picture:

See how the icons do not sit right next to the title of the item and you are left with masses of white space. This bug only seams to appear in IE8 and in firefox it works just fine. The picture below shows the same thing in Firefox:

This looks much better. I did a bit of digging around using the IE developer tools (just press F12) and tracked down what was causing the error. It’s the CSS width attribute which is set to 0.01% in the coreV4.css My colleague Rob Brown @littlemenace1 (who for a 17 year old knows far too much about far too many things!) assures me that only integers are supported here, so 0.01 is meaningless. IE8 must just get confused and ignore the width attribute all-together whereas Firefox just gets on with things and assumes it’s 1 or 0 but then expands the width to fit the icon and any padding.

Here is the offending CSS:

As we already have a custom masterpage and CSS applied, all I had to do was add

.ms-vb-icon {
    width: 1% !important;
}

into our CSS and all was fine.
If you don’t have a custom CSS and don’t want to make one then I think you could probably get away with doing what I always say you shouldn’t and edit the core CSS. Just watch out for it being overwritten during updates.

While I was at it I also updated the DOCICON.XML and associated images to make the folder icon and a few others more up-to-date. Results below!

Hopefully the CSS will be fixed in an update or service pack in the future.

If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.

This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!

Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.

Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’

Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’

Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’

Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.

Click ok.

Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!

  One of the annoying things I have found using SharePoint 2007 was the inability to upload a PDF file and see a PDF icon next to the file name, this situation has not changed with SharePoint 2010 so I thought I would run through how to add an icon file for PDF and other unsupported file types in SharePoint 2010.

 Working in a school you do find a vast array of different software applications being used, as an example we use the entire Abode Creative suite so when a member of staff uploads a fireworks file to SharePoint there appears just a blank icon. So one of the things we have to put on the snagging list for our 2010 rollout is making sure that all the file types we use have an associated icon file appear next to the names in a document library. This is basically the same process as with 2007 apart from some path changes so.

On your SharePoint server navigate to (default install)

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES”

And place a 16 x 16 picture file (Gif, Jpg or Png) of the file type you wish to add All the icon files in the images folder have the format ic***.gif so I named my PDF icon icpdf.gif

After you copy the picture file you need navigate to

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML”

And edit the DocIcon.xml with notepad and add the line

<Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”icpdf.gif”/>  

Once this is edited and saved (I would also recommend doing a backup of the file before you save it) you will need to do an IISreset before the icon will display.

Also please bear in mind a couple of points if you have more than 1 server in your farm you will need to repeat this procedure on all of your servers and please backup the docicon.xml file and image files away from your servers as they may get overwritten with updates.

Dave