How to exclude a field from spellcheck in sharepoint 2010?

Question

I have a SharePointWebControls:UserField in a page layout that needs to be excluded from spell checking, as otherwise whenever a user is selected there are a large number of spelling errors are detected in the code-behind for the control.

It seems that in Sharepoint 2007 this behaviour could be implemented by using excludefromspellcheck = "true" but this doesn't seem to work for Sharepoint 2010. Has anyone come across the same problem and found a way around it?

Answer 1

Based on SpellCheckEntirePage.js, that appears to still be the way:

var elements=document.body.getElementsByTagName("*");
for (index=0; index < elements.length;++index)
{
    if (null !=elements[index].getAttribute("excludeFromSpellCheck"))
    {
        continue;
    }
    // snipped - if (elements[index].tagName=="INPUT")
    // snipped - else if (elements[index].tagName=="TEXTAREA")
}

But excludeFromSpellCheck is not a property of UserField, so it probably won't automatically copy down to the rendered HTML. When rendered, the UserField control is made up of several elements. I would try looking at the View Source to see if excludeFromSpellCheck is making it into the final HTML. But to set the attribute on the appropriate elements, you might need to use some jQuery like this:

$("(input|textarea)[id*='UserField']").attr("excludeFromSpellCheck", "true");