Terms in the SharePoint Managed Metadata Term Store can be ordered through the Custom Sort Order option in the Custom Sort tab of the Term Store Management UI:

However, if you pull items from the term store using JavaScript getAllTerms, those terms will be returned alphabetically, not in the custom sort order. That is, a call to…

var terms = termSet.getAllTerms();

…will not maintain ordering you’ve specified with the Custom Sort Order by default. What you should do is include the ‘CustomSortOrder’ field in your load before you execute the query. This looks as follows:

var terms = termSet.getAllTerms();
context.load(terms, 'Include(...,CustomSortOrder, ...)'); // specify list of all required fields
context.executeQueryAsync(function () {
    var termEnumerator = terms.getEnumerator();
    while (termEnumerator.moveNext()) {
        var currentTerm = termEnumerator.get_current();
        var termOrder = currentTerm.get_customSortOrder(); // Include enables this to be called
        ...
        ...
    }
},...);

If a custom order is present, the variable termOrder (i.e. var termOrder in the above example) will include a colon delimited list of the term store item Guids that are children of the current term. This delimited list will be built in the correct Custom Sort Order specified in the Term Store. You can easily parse and work with this list now to get items from the Term Store in the correct Custom Sort Order:

var orders = termOrder.split(':');
for (var i = 0; i < orders.length; i++) {
    var key = orders[i]; // key is the term Guid
    // do something, you're looping through children in the correct Custom Sort Order
}

That’s all there is to it:

1. getAllTerms
2. Provide your Include fields. At the very least for this blog, include CustomSortOrder
3. Now when you execute the query, the fields you specified will be available in the return objects
4. Call get_customSortOrder() to pull the field
5. Split on the delimiter (i.e. ‘:’) and go

This is a quick post about using jQuery UI and Moment.js to render calendar UI within, for this case, SharePoint.

When using the CSOM, SharePoint will return DateOnly fields where the date value will likely need to be parsed in some way before you render the value for users.  For example, today, 7/22/2015, will be returned as Wed Jul 22 00:00:00 PDT 2015. At the very least, you’ll likely want to split and rejoin (substring, etc.) the date to exclude the “00:00:00” time stamp before rendering it in any way considered to be “friendly”.

Now, if you use a simple calendar control from jQuery UI, you’ll want to take the parsing a bit further, and you’ll also need to convert something like the stamp above to read “7/22/2015”. Otherwise, by default, the date won’t mean anything to the jQuery UI calendar if you’ve casted a control using the datepicker() method.

You can imagine the HTML/jQuery:

$('#new-task-startdate').datepicker();
...
...
<input type="text" id="new-task-startdate"/>

So, how do we convert “Wed Jul 22 00:00:00 PDT 2015” to “7/22/2015”. Well, you could use a few one-off JavaScript date/time objects and string manipulation if you’re going to do simple reformatting like this a few times. But, as things get more advanced and heavy date manipulation is required, I prefer to use the the moment.js libraries. I find moment.js extremely intuitive, and more importantly, it scales up to do hundreds of alternative formats and when you really want to get advanced and work with timezones, there with moment-timezone. It’s a library worth learning for its ease of use, dozens of formatting options, and solid timezone support. So, how much code is needed to get “Wed Jul 22 00:00:00 PDT 2015” converted to “7/22/2015”? One line:

var startDate = moment(spStartDate).format("MM/DD/YYYY");

And, to the point above, if you expect to cast dates back and forth between UTC and the local zone, or you need to render the local time according to city and country names, you’d have that added support with just a few more lines of code.