SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I have seen a lot recently about the changes to SPD 2013 and especially the removal of the Design View from page editing and the impact that would have on peoples normal daily SharePoint work. The rational for the change is here on the SharePoint team blog, some of the responses on End User SharePoint are worth a read, and non of them are very positive. So I thought I would take a look a couple of typical End User style visual solution and see it can see be used in the brave new world of SPD2013.

Using calculated columns to add colour coding to your SharePoint lists

This excellent solution comes from Sarah Haase. I won’t cover the steps for 2010, but will go straight into 2013.

The 1st step is to grab a copy of SPD2013 preview from the MS download site and get this running in your SP2013 world, then setup your list and calculated column and open your site in SPD2013, at first glance a site in SPD2013 looks exactly the same as an SPD2010, but when you open the list-view you have the option of code view or code view, nice !

So how do we make appropriate change now that we have no visual representation of the page ?

If we go to the List View Tools tab section and select the Design tab, we have the option to Customize the XLST for the entire view (this is available in SPD2010 as well)

Now its a case of searching for the tag

<xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]"/>

and updating it to read

<xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
 

Save the page view,  preview in a browser and voila, a colour coded column in SharePoint 2013.

So was this more difficult then 2010 ?, The answer is Yes and No, without the visual representation of the page it would have been much more difficult to figure out which tag to update, but once you know that, the actual change is no more difficult, but I think that is the crux of the issue, features like conditional formatting are now going to be much much more difficult to apply in SPD2013 when we are going to have to work through the entire list view code.