Welcome to the conclusion of my mini-series dedicated to the List and Forms Extensions Toolkit. So far I've covered the installation of the List and Forms Extensions Toolkit on the server, and the initial setup of each of the individual custom columns within a SharePoint site. Now it's time to demonstrate how I went about populating each of the custom columns with relevant data.
Once I had finished adding an instance of each of the four columns to my Custom Column Test page, I set about populating each of them by clicking the New -> New Item drop down on the list itself, which surfaced the following display:
What could be easier, right? I proceeded to drop some basic text in the Custom Column Security field (which is to say, text which will be encrypted when displayed to any user or group not designated by the list owner to see the contents); some rich text into the Rich Text field (using the built-in WYSIWIG toolbar interface which is, incidentally much more fully-featured than the out of the box rich text toolbar, and which and includes a multi-language spell check); and I chose an item from the list I'd chosen to hook the Lookup Selector up to (allowing me to reference existing list data from elsewhere in the site collection) ... which only left the Visual Indicator. Hey, how come there's no field to populate the Visual Indicator?
That realization led me to revisit the Visual Indicator setup and, paying closer attention this time, I noticed the importance of the List Column section. Unless there's a column from which the Visual Indicator can pull data for which it can then show a color-coded incremental visual representation of, there's not much that column is really going to be able to accomplish, is there? Duh.
So I added a new column which I called % Complete, then I selected that column as the List Column while editing the Visual Indicator column I'd already created and, sure enough, the next time I selected New Item from the New drop down on the main list, I was seeing a new field to populate:
Since this was the final piece of my puzzle, I thought it rather appropriate to enter 100 as the percent complete, and with that data in place, my completed assignment looked like this:
As you can see, Custom Column Security content renders as encrypted, the Lookup Selector column has rendered my desired selection from an existing list (yes, a test list comprised of types of apples); Rich Text renders as rich text, and Visual Indicator has shown visually that I'm at 100% (showing the color bar as completely filled in, and also showing the "100%" next to the bar). I've left my % Complete column intact here but, needless to say, that column can (and should) be hidden since it's duplicative in the view as shown.
After successfully completing my assignment, and while preparing this post, I discovered that the means by which I've employed the custom columns has merely scratched the surface of what they're capable of. As a result, I'm going to recommend that if you're looking for custom columns with similar functionality (and you're wrestling with the "buy vs. code" decision), but would like some more information, here are a few dedicated blogs on each of the custom columns which I'd encourage you to check out:
If you're ready to get your hands on the Custom Column Pack, and you just can't wait to see how you can make our custom columns work in your own environment, you (or your Systems as applicable) can download a free 15-day trial or buy at any time, and leave the coding to us!
On Friday, SharePoint Blank Investigates returns, so tune in as I once again devote my attentions to user-submitted questions.
Getting to Know the List and Forms Extensions Toolkit (collect all three!):
Posted
Mar 11 2009, 05:39 PM
by
John Anderson
Filed under: SharePoint List, Custom Column, List and Forms Extensions Toolkit, Rich Text, Custom Column Security, Visual Indicator, Lookup Selector, SharePoint Dashboards, SharePoint Columns, SharePoint Dashboard, SharePoint Encryption, SharePoint List Lookup, SharePoint List Drop Down, sharePoint Rich Text, SharePoint KPI, Encrypt SharePoint, SharePoint Lookup Column, SharePoint Field Level Security
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.