Most web-savvy tech types know better than to use "special" characters in URL fields - apostrophes, question marks, carets, ampersands, and the like. Unfortunately, this rule of thumb is lost on the average SharePoint user and an open text box with no validation is an invitation to wreak havoc on your carefully constructed portal navigation. IE will overlook most illegal characters but some third-party or custom developed navigational controls will not, so a good practice would be to discourage the use of symbols in Title and URL fields.
You can, of course, add big warnings to the admin pages warning against such malfeasance but we all know that the bigger the warning, the more often it is overlooked. So what to do? The best way to handle this situation is to check the user input against a list of disallowed characters and force text modifications before the field is posted. Fortunately, if your portal consists mostly of WSS sites, you've got it made - the WSS site creation form (scsignup.aspx) has built-in validation to prevent users from entering illegal characters in certain fields; however, if you make extensive use of SPS areas, the solution is not quite so simple. Here's how to replicate the WSS behavior in SPS:
First, create a script to check the user's input against your list of illegal characters, similar to the following:
<script>
function validateSiteName(ctlId)
{
var iChars = "!@#$%^&*()+=[]';,./{}\":<>?";
var ctlName = document.getElementById(ctlId) for (var i = 0; i < ctlName.value.length; i++)
{
if (iChars.indexOf(ctlName.value.charAt(i)) != -1)
{
alert ("The Title field contains special characters which are not allowed. Please remove them and try again.");
ctlName.focus();
return false;
}
}
}
</script>
This script defines the list of illegal characters (iChars), gets the ID of the input box (ctlName), then, if the text box isn't empty, steps through each character and matches it against the list. If a character matches one of the illegal characters, the script displays an alert box asking the user to remove the offending characters and returns the focus to the input field, preventing them from saving the form without fixing the problem.
Second, paste the script into the <HEAD> section of the area creation and modification pages (spnewcategory.aspx and speditcategory.aspx, respectively) or append the function to OWS.JS file (which is called from every page within the portal).
Third, call the script using the onBlur method from the form. Find the following code block on the page:
<SPSWC:InputFormTextBox
runat="server"
id="TextBoxTitle"
IsTextTrimmed = "true"
LabelTextLocId="SiteAdminCreateCategory_Title_Colon_Text" AccessKeyLocId="SiteAdminCreateCategory_Title_AccessKey"/>
Then add the onBlur event to the end:
<SPSWC:InputFormTextBox
runat="server"
id="TextBoxTitle"
IsTextTrimmed ="true"
LabelTextLocId="SiteAdminCreateCategory_Title_Colon_Text" AccessKeyLocId="SiteAdminCreateCategory_Title_AccessKey"
onBlur="validateSiteName(this.id);"/>
This will fire the validateSiteName function whenever the user clicks or tabs out of the input field.
Finally, save the modified pages to the 60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033 directory and users will be unable to enter any illegal characters into the area title field, which is used by SPS to construct the bucketed URL, thereby preventing any incompatabilities with navigational tools and utilities.
