Navigating around a large Intranet or Web Site can be frustrating at times, sometimes you need to use the same sites over and over again, for this you can add it to your favourites and away you go, so long as it does not disappear amongst the rest! Other times you can use a links lists to send you there but if the list is 50 items long it loses its ease of use. This is where Lightning Jump comes in, what we have developed is an Auto Suggest textbox which gets Keywords from a dedicated SharePoint list and using not much screen real estate allows for a nice clean navigation.
How does it work?
There are 3 parts to our solution: At the back end we have a SharePoint list which holds the keyword and the navigation URL, next up we have a Web Service which queries the Keywords List and returns the results and at the front we have the Web Part.
The Keyword list a custom SharePoint list, we have implemented a custom field which prevents users from using the same keyword twice but apart from that you have a standard list with some added columns. As we have used a Standard List you can restrict access to a particular keyword by amending the Items Permission in the list, if a user cannot read the list item then it will not appear in their suggestions or on the View All Keywords page.
The Text Box within the Web Part uses pure JavaScript to call the Web Service, there is no Ajax Framework being used which means that you do not need to make any configuration changes to your environment to get it working.
We have also provided a ‘View All’ page which shows all of the available keywords and can be filtered Alphabetically or by the keyword group.
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