Skip to main content

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 in SharePoint site. This is how it looks like:
Default Style
Basic Table:
This view is somewhat similar to Default view but with two notable changes. In this view, ECB menu appears as drop down (like previous version of SharePoint) and Add New Item link is shown just below the view.
Basic Table

Boxed:
This view provides "Contact Card" type of view as shown below.
Boxed

Boxed, no labels:
This is view is similar to the previous one except that column labels are not displayed along with value.
Boxed, no labels

Shaded:
This view is similar to Basic Table but with shaded color for alternate rows. Obviously this view provides a better presentation than Basic Table style.
Shaded
Preview Pane:
This view provides "preview" style where in there are two parts in this view: one which list down the values of Title column and other displays values of other columns when you hover on specific value of Title column. Because of this presentation, it occupies less space to display the list values and not all rows are displayed at a time. This view is quite useful when you have to display contact details in home page where you have space limitation.
Preview Pane
Limitation of Preview Pane:
With all other styles, you can use typical elements of the view such as filter, sort, and grouping. However, with Preview Pane, though Filter and Sort works, Group By does not work. If you try to apply Group By with Preview Pane style, you will get error message as shown below.
The Preview Pane view style cannot be used with grouped views.
Newsletter:
For remaining two styles, I will use Announcement List as this is better suited than Contact List. Newsletter style displays the information one below the other with a line break between each row as shown below.
Newsletter
Newsletter No Lines:
This is similar to the previous one, with one change: instead of line, row is separated by kind of shaded bar.
Newsletter No Lines

Summary:
As you can see, applying these styles brings a new or fresh look to the List view. However, except for Default style, for all other styles, "Find an Item" search box is not displayed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.

Get User Id using REST or JavaScript Object Model

Sometimes you would need to fetch the User Id based on either Login name or Email id. You would need User Id if you need to assign a user object to a people picker control or People/Group field. How do we get the Id based on Email or Login Name in client side development? We can achieve that using JavaScript Object Model or REST API. Let me share the first example using JavaScript Object Model (JSOM). var context = new SP.ClientContext.get_current(); this.user = context.get_web().ensureUser(loginName or Email); var o = { d: d, user: this.user }; context.load(this.user); context.executeQueryAsync(     Function.createDelegate(o, ensureUserSuccess),     Function.createDelegate(o, Fail) ); The above code fetches User Id for a given Login Name or Email Id. Interestingly, there is no equivalent endpoint available in REST! The Microsoft documentation talk about a endpoint but I could not get it working. So what is the way to get User Id using REST? You have to use the hidd