Sharepoint Insight by Namwar Rizvi

October 21, 2009

Custom Edit Form for SharePoint Lists

Filed under: Customization, Errors, Tips — namwar @ 11:05 am
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If you want to set a custom edit form to your Sharepoint List then please make sure you follow these Golden Rules as correctly suggested by Hugo in a SharePoint news group.

  1. NEVER delete or rename the default pages…
    when you want to create a new EditForm.aspx it’s best to copy it to
    another file and then edit the original one (without renaming it and
    without reassigning the supporting files)…
  2. DON’T ever delete the webparts that exist.
    It’s better to hide them and create new ones “side-by-side”.

These rules are real time savers and I will highly encourage every reader to follow them.

October 14, 2009

How to use Case statement in RenderPattern of a Custom Field Type

Filed under: Tips — namwar @ 10:19 pm
Tags: , , ,

While designing a custom field type, you may sometime need to render different HTML based on the value of field. For example, if you want to display Red,Amber, Green traffic light images to highlight High,Medium, Low value then you need to dynamically switch image url based  on the value of the field.

In CAML, you have Case structure to implement this switching logic. It works very much like the C# switch-case statement. Following is an example of RenderPattern of a custom field which display different images based on the value of the field.

<RenderPattern Name="DisplayPattern">
      <Switch>
        <Expr>
          <Column />
        </Expr>
        <Case Value="1" >
          <HTML><![CDATA[<img alt="Red" src="/_layouts/IMAGES/ewr210m.gif" />]]></HTML>
         </Case>
        <Case Value="2" >
          <HTML><![CDATA[<img alt="Amber" src="/_layouts/IMAGES/ewr211m.gif"]]></HTML>
        </Case>
        <Case Value="3" >
          <HTML><![CDATA[<img alt="Green" src="/_layouts/IMAGES/ewr209m.gif"]]></HTML>
        </Case>
        <Default>
            <HTML><![CDATA[<span>No Value</span>]]></HTML>
        </Default>
      </Switch>
    </RenderPattern>

June 14, 2009

How to add custom CSS in your WebPart

Filed under: C#, Solutions, Tips — namwar @ 10:37 pm
Tags: , ,

If you want to add custom CSS file for your webpart, here is the code:

  1. protected override void CreateChildControls()
  2. {
  3. base.CreateChildControls();
  5. CssLink cssLink = new CssLink();
  6. cssLink.DefaultUrl = “/_layouts/Test.css”;
  7. this.Page.Header.Controls.Add(cssLink);
  8. }

September 30, 2008

Update List Item without changing Modified By and Modified fields

Filed under: Object Model — namwar @ 8:44 pm
Tags: , ,

If you update a field of a SPListItem obeject from code by using the following code snippet

item["Title"]=”Updated Title”;

item.Update();

then you will notice that Modified By  and Modified field will be updated also. Sometimes, you just want to update fields without changing Modified By and Modified fields, you can do so by using 

item.SystemUpdate();

instead of item.Update();

SystemUpdate() method just updates the intended field values.

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