SharePoint Client JavaScript Documentation

Question

I'm attempting to improve the usability of a client's SharePoint deployment via JQuery; and am hitting a brick wall when trying to find any sort of documentation of what's happening in core.js (aside from painfully digging through and trying to parse any sort of meaning out of it --all 250kb of it!!!!--) Anyone have any pointers, or documentation?

EDIT:

Sorry, to clarify my question, i'm familiar with using JQuery with SharePoint. My question involves hooking JQuery into SharePoint's own client API. My question is inspired by this post http://www.codefornuts.com/2009/09/forcing-sharepoint-into-asynchronous.html# ; where the author is overriding methods such as "SubmitFormPost" and "STSNavigate" in order to make the UI interaction more "AJAXy".

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do, but you may want to take a look at Jan Tielen's work with jQuery and SharePoint. He has some interesting posts about calling the SharePoint web services with jQuery/Ajax to build much richer UIs. These are hosted within a SharePoint web part page using a Content Editor Web Part. I've used these techniques in a couple of applications with great results.

Check out this post for an example.

Answer 2

There's no documentation for core.js and it's really a black box. Any "messing" with it would make your installation unsupported. Because of its complexity and how important it is to SharePoint working correctly, I would be very careful before adding this sort of functionality. This is not a comment on your development ability, but IMHO there would need to be a serious business case along the lines of "we don't care if things break occasionally so things look cooler".

If you really want to continue this I think your best bet is to contact Einar! His is the only post I've ever seen that describes how to do AJAXify core.js.

Answer 3

If you are using SharePoint 2010, then the concept named ECMAScript Client Object Model will help you. And about the documentation it is not completely framed and you can know what the properties and methods an object has using Internet Explorer debugging mode as explained here "How to know the SharePoint 2010 ECMASCript object properties and methods".