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Creating New List Form in Discussion List? Be aware of limitations!

If you add a New Form to the Discussion List and set it as default, you would expect all Discussion List web parts to point to the new form. Unfortunately, it does not! To explain this behavior, let me start with a custom List.

Let us take any custom List. By default, it has 3 forms (New, Edit, and Display). Open SharePoint Designer, navigate to this List and add a new "New Form" (call it NewForm2.aspx) and make it as default.

Now wherever you have added the above custom List as a web part (List View Web Part), when you click on "new item", it opens up the newly created NewForm2.aspx. This is what we would also expect since we have made it as default New Form. If you closely observe the hyperlink of "new item" in a List View Web Part, it looks as below:

http://[domain]/sites/[SiteCollection]/_layouts/15/listform.aspx?PageType=[PageTypeID]&ListId=[ListGUID]&RootFolder=

Basically when we click on "new item" link, it takes us to a layout page listform.aspx with ListGUID and other parameters and finally NewForm2.aspx is loaded. May be internally this is handled.

Unfortunately this behavior is quite different when it comes to a Discussion List. If you create a new "New Form" and make it as default, none of the Discussion List web parts point to newly created form. If you closely observe the hyperlink of "new discussion" link of the web part, it points to:

http://[domain]/sites/[SiteCollection]/Lists/Discussion/NewForm.aspx?Source=[URL]

This does not point to listform.aspx, instead it points to NewForm.aspx. Now, when you change the default to NewForm2.aspx, the web part still points to NewForm.aspx only. That means, if at all you want to create a new "New Form" and set it as default, you also need to change the hyperlinks of all the web parts of Discussion List. That is really a cumbersome job if you have many web parts in place. If you are using Community site, additionally you need to change in Category.aspx page as well!

Having understood the problem, let us look at a simple solution to this.

Approach 1: This approach is for people who are not familiar with JavaScript.

Open Developer Tools (F12 in IE), navigate to the page where Discussion web part is added and then focus DOM Explorer to the "new discussion" hyperlink. Copy the entire code within the DIV with class "ms-comm-heroLinkContainer".

Edit the page and insert Content Editor Web Part and add the above HTML code. Ensure that you replace NewForm.aspx to the newly created form name (in my example, NewForm2.aspx). Save the Content Editor Web Part.

With this a new link is displayed which points to NewForm2.aspx. Now we need to hide the link of the existing web part. Select Discussion List View Web Part and Edit its properties. Change the Toolbar property from "Full Toolbar" to "No Toolbar", click OK. Save the Page.

Approach 2: This approach is for people who are familiar with JavaScript.

Edit the page and insert Content Editor Web Part and add the below code within Script HTML tags:

$(document).ready(function () {

    var hrefVal = $(".ms-comm-heroLinkContainer a").attr('href');

    hrefVal = hrefVal.replace("NewForm.aspx","NewForm2.aspx");

    $(".ms-comm-heroLinkContainer a").attr('href',hrefVal);

}); 

With a simple script/HTML, we can make the web part "new item" link to point to the new form.
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