Skip to main content

Document ID Service - New Feature in SharePoint

When I explored this new feature of SharePoint in Online (this feature is available in SharePoint 2013 also), I found it interesting because it solved one of the common problems people faced in SharePoint. I will first explain about this feature and I'll cover the problem and the solution in another post.

This feature allows Site Collection Admin assign a unique ID to every document in the site collection out of the box. If you recall, there was no out of the box way to assign a unique number to the documents across libraries in a site collection. Yes ID column is unique but only within a library. Document ID column contains a number which is unique across libraries.

To start with, let's have a look at a typical document library. This is a familiar view for SP guys. By default, you don't get Document ID column in a library.

All Items View
To get Document ID column, you need to activate a site collection feature "Document ID Service" as shown below.
Site Collection Feature

Once this feature is activated, you can notice a link under Site Collection Administration called "Document ID Settings".
Settings
When you click on this link, you are shown with some options. Here I am prefixing document id with "DOCID". Also you need to check "Reset all Document IDs in this site collection..." check box.
Apply Settings

By this time, Document ID column is available in all the libraries. You need to go to Modify View page to add this column.
Add to View

Once you add it to view, this is how the value looks like for Document ID.
Document Library View

This value has three parts: [Prefix Text]-[Library Number]-[Item ID]

This Library Number is my guess as I observed in some cases. How this number is allocated is not yet clear.

I copied an item from one library to another and the copied item got a new number to it.
Copied item with new Document ID

Another interesting observation is, when I navigate to Record Center, it had a search option to search based on Document ID.
Search based on Document ID in Record Center
It will take you to Display Form of that specific document.

This feature can be used to solve many business problems especially in the case of compliance requirements. Of course, how best we can use this feature is up to the solution providers to decide.

In my next post, I'll discuss about a simple solution to a simple problem which we faced in previous versions of SharePoint.

Update [6-May-2015]: How to get Item ID in a calculated column using Document ID.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All about SharePoint List View Styles

Sometimes, there are out of the box features which we tend to ignore and later when we do apply, we are more than happy about the feature which is readily available in SharePoint. One such feature is List View Style. I never thought I would write a post on this. However, whenever I spoke about this with users, people were excited to see the result. That prompted me to write this post. Instead of getting into only theory part, I will basically take use cases where these styles can be applied and also touch up on on some minor limitations with certain style. When you are creating/modifying a List view, you will get an option to select View Style. As shown below, there are 8 options available and Default is always set if you ignore this style. List of View Styles I will take typical Contact List and Announcement List to explian about these styles. Let us go one by one. Default: This view, as name suggest, is the default style in a view. This is one of the widely seen style ...
1 comment
Read more

How to update Person field with multiple values using REST API

Person or Group field in SharePoint is similar to a Lookup field. When you are updating this field using REST API, you need to append "Id" to the name of the column in the body construct. For example, the body construct looks like this: data: { "__metadata": { "type": "SP.Data. ListName ListItem" }, "Title": "First Item", " PeopleField Id": "4" }; The highlighted portions should be replaced by the actual List Name and Column Name. In the above example, the REST call is updating a List item with Title and People columns. How to get the value for user ID ("4" in the above example) needs a separate explanation and that will be my next post! The above example works fine if Person field is configured to accept only one value. If we change the Person field to accept multiple values, how do we pass more than one value in the REST call? Since we normally separate user names with semicolon in peop...
12 comments
Read more

How to get SharePoint List or Library GUID via REST

Sometimes, you would need List or Library GUID to use that in some operation. In such cases, how do you get hold of GUID using REST API? There is a straight-forward end point which you can use: /_api/web/lists/getByTitle('ListTitle')/Id This will return the GUID of a List or Library. There is also another approach. However this approach works only if a List or Library contains at least one item. /_api/web/lists/getByTitle('ListTitle')/items This is a familiar end point which we use to fetch items of a List or Library. To get the GUID from the response, you would do: var listIDTemp = response.data.d.results[0].__metadata.id; var listID = listIDTemp.substring(listIDTemp.lastIndexOf("guid") + 5).split('\'')[0]; As you can see, we are doing string operations to fetch GUID from metadata.id. This contains information only if the response has at least one item.
Post a Comment
Read more