We’ve got an interesting requirement. We’re using a SharePoint list to store documents which are related to K2 SmartObjects. One of my colleagues is building a custom user control that’s going to show information from this SmartObjects, and associated documents. We want to allow users to
Sounds complicated? Actually, it’s not so hard! Continue reading
SharePoint is made up of lists of items, where an item is a set of data. Here is the standard display of an item’s properties:
As you can see, we’ve got a item, and it has some fields of data, and they’re being displayed inside a web part. Those fields are columns on the list:
All very familiar, I’m sure. It gets interesting when we start using Lookup columns, though. These are columns that refer to items in other lists. For example, this is a list of documents, but they refer to items in the above list (that’s what the Item Ref column is doing):
Cool, but wouldn’t it be great if I could show a list of items referring to a particular item on it’s display page? For example, in this case wouldn’t it be good to show a list of ‘Item Documents’ on the DispForm.aspx page used to show the Item’s properties? Well, you can:
(Edit: one of my colleagues points out that Microsoft did this in one of the Fab 40 templates – but I didn’t know).
So how does it work? Continue reading
Forms pages are not really that different to normal pages, but are worth a mention. These are hidden pages inside lists and libraries, and they provide the forms for creating new (and editing existing) items. They exist in a hidden _forms folder in the list:
As you can see, the forms folder for this document library contains quite a number of forms pages! So what do they look like?
Looking in SharePoint Designer at the form page, we see a web part zone containing a web part – in this case the ListFormWebPart. So why is this interesting? Well, we could put our own web part here, should we wish to. For example, you might be recording longitude and latitude on a list item – but that isn’t very intuitive. Instead, we could write a web part to display a map, and use that to update the list item.
In short, they’re not pages I’d expect to edit often – but there is quite a lot you can do with them!
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