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Posted tagged ‘SharePoint Field Types’

Three Powerful Columns (Not many people know about.)

September 12, 2008

SharePoint has lots of terrific functionality. Some of it can be fairly difficult to find. The three columns this post is about are definitely difficult to find and many SharePoint developers and people I have talked to do not know they even exist. I have decided to write a quick post on these columns so that everyone can know a little bit more about these powerful field controls SharePoint has built.

In a typical SharePoint list (with features turned on) we see the following column field types to create our column based on:

What’s interesting is that within the site columns list we get the option of a few extra field types for our columns. In particular the following three are available and are otherwise unavailable in a list’s create column view.

So what do these columns do?

Select This	To Display This
Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing	Columns that display the contents of the HTML Editor Web Part. Content and formatting constraints may be applied to the column.
Image with formatting and constraints for publishing	Columns that store links to images defined in the item properties. Each column displays an image, and optional formatting and constraints may be applied to it.
Hyperlink with formatting and constraints for publishing	Columns that store hyperlinks and display the names of hyperlinks defined in the item properties. Link formatting and constraints may apply.

Here are some common examples of when these columns can come in handy. Let’s say you have a publishing site and are creating content via list technology. So to create a new article and show this article in the news section of your site you populate Rich Text and HTML. The problem in a publishing environment is sometimes you need to limit the options of the people creating content. This way it ensures that everything shows up according to your colour schemas and the such. Well the “Full HTML content..” column can be used to do just that. Since you can modify the buttons available on this one it is possible to limit what functionality is available to users.

The image and link columns talked about here are also terrific. Provinding users with a more user friendly way of adding images, or links (with browse dialogs and the such) rather than having to manually input the URL of the image or web reference.

Here are the columns in action:

Again with some content, note that I can change the size of the image (among other things) which is more than the hyperlink (formatted as an image) can provide.

And here you can see them in Datasheet view where we can see the actual content that would be rendered via XSLT in a content query web part or data form web part.

I highly recommend taking a look at these columns if you haven’t already as they can really help in deployments of publishing site solutions and like I said, they are kind of hidden away since they are only visible typically in the create site column page.

Note: If you are having trouble finding these site column types (from the list, or wish to add them to a list) keep in mind that the columns I mention in this post are all only available under the “Site Columns” and require you to create a new site wide available column before you can add it to a list.

Update: To clarify/respond to questions I have recieved tossing some related links here.