SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

For those of you that are familiar with the project ideas lists in Microsoft’s PPM PWA application you might want to skip this first paragraph. Any list you create in the PWA site collection at the top level you will see a button Create Projects, if you are not familiar with this feature take a look at this blog post: http://bit.ly/2aeWGwK.

The purpose of this post isn’t to revisit that feature, this post covers getting access to some of the data on that list that is hidden from the views and creating an enhanced view for the Project Ideas type list.

If you look at the view details, you can see below the columns I can add to this view:

Yet if I look at the columns available on this list using the REST API I see a few more, a key one being MSPWAPROJUID as seen below:

This column gets updated with the Project GUID when you create a project from the list. As this is a hidden column it can’t be added to any views which is a shame as that would be very useful. I thought ok, simple, I will just update the field hidden property false then add it to the view. Whilst that change is very simple with a few lines of code this appears to break the column getting updated with the Project GUID so I don’t recommend doing that currently. If I found a way to get this working I will create a post. So as that didn’t work that lead me on to the next idea, lets build my own view on a page. This can be seen below:

I have made the Item Title clickable to open the list item in a new window and where an idea item has been converted into a project, the Project GUID is a clickable link to the view the project. This opens the schedule Project Detail Page. The columns are sortable, by default it is sorted by Item ID, to change this use the arrows in the table column heading. As you can see, I don’t have much data on my test system and only one idea has been created into a project.

I have made the code available on the Microsoft code gallery, it can be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/29ZXh8M

To get the script to work for your PWA instance in Project Online you will need to update the listName variable to set the correct list title for your project ideas list:

Replace ProjectIdeas with the correct title. Save the JavaScript file in a document library in the PWA site collection then create a web part page in the PWA site collection, for example I created the page and uploaded the script to the Shared Documents library:

On the new web page page I added a content editor web part and linked to the JavaScript file:

Click Apply then OK and the data should load if the listName variable is correct. You can then add a link to the new page from the PWA quick launch if needed.

A nice simple solution that provides more functionality than the standard SharePoint view.