Version History comments being truncated

Question

Cross posting this from Reddit, since it's not getting a lot of love there.

One of the biggest challenges I have with getting users to buy in to SharePoint's versioning features is the fact that version history is kind of a PIA (from a user experience perspective) to get to. Adding to that, if you use an append only comments field, and you happen to have an item (say, a project tracking line item) that takes a lot of updates over time, the form can get unwieldy and stupid to deal with. I get a ton of complaints about that.

So, I had the brilliant idea to use a little javascript/jquery magic to go GET the version history page for an item and remake it into something that could be viewable on the edit/view item form. Here's my code (don't laugh at me, I literally taught myself javascript last year on the job):

function getVersionHistory(guid,id){
    var d=$.Deferred()
    var versionsUrl=url+'/_layouts/versions.aspx?list='+guid+'&ID='+id;
    $.get(versionsUrl,function(data){
        var versionEntries=parseVersionList(data);
        d.resolve(versionEntries)
    });
    return d.promise();
}


function parseVersionList(data){
    var items=[];
    var versionList=$(data).find('table.ms-settingsframe > tbody > tr[class]').each(function(i){
        var item={};
        if(i > 0 && (i-1) % 2 == 0) {
            var row=$(this);
            item.version=row.prev().find('td:first').html().trim();
            item.modified=row.prev().find('td.ms-vb').find('a').html().trim();
            item.editor=row.prev().find('td.ms-vb2').find('a.ms-subtleLink').html().trim();   
                    item.notes=row.find('tr[id*="ProjectUpdates"] > td.ms-vb:not(:empty)').text();
            item.changes=[];
            row.find('tr[title]:not([id*="ProjectUpdates"])').each(function(){
                var previous=$(this).attr('title').split(': ');
                var field=$(this).find('td.ms-propertysheet').html().trim();
                var newValue=$(this).find('td.ms-vb').html().trim();
                var change={field:field,preV:previous[1],newV:newValue};
                item.changes.push(change);
            });
        items.push(item);
        }
    });
    return items;
}

Your mileage may vary on that, but that appears to be all the correct classes/elements for parsing the HTML on the version history page. getVersionHistory(), given the list's GUID and item ID, returns an object that I then pass into a handlebars template for rendering a nice little Office UI-ish card.

Now, to my actual problem: on the version history page, anything over 250 characters in the append-only comments (AOC) field gets cut. But only on the version history page. If I look at the edit form with the AOC, you can see the full text.

So, therein lies my dilemma. What would you all do with this? Should I scrape up the previous AOC entries from the edit form and try and shoehorn them into my version history object somehow? Should I stop trying to placate my users and let them deal with an edit form that can scroll out to infinity when the AOC entries get voluminous?

Answer 1

Well, I decided to go ahead and scrape the full note text off of the edit form and work it into my version card, like so:

//Get the updates.
var updates=$('span[data-displayName="ProjectUpdates"] > div').contents();

//Parse each one into a div.
for(var i=0;i<updates.length;i+=7){updates.slice(i,i+7).wrapAll('<div class="update"></div>')};

//Work through the div and create an object with the notes and the last modified date.
updates.map(function(i,u){var update={},eot=$(u).text().indexOf('M): ')+4;update.fullText=$(u).text().substring(eot);update.dateTime=$(u).children()[1].innerHTML;updateFullText.push(update)});

Then, once I'm building my little version card, I just compare the last modified date on the version history page with the one I grabbed from the on screen text. If they match, I create a new object property called "fullTextNotes" and put that in an if/then statement in my handlebars template. Then I used a jQuery plugin to keep the text truncated until the user wants to look at the whole thing.

Hopefully this will be helpful to someone else.