Splitting Shares

I needed to create a form that automatically populates the values for a user when they click the OK button. It turns out that SharePoint requires at least one editable field in order to save the form (If anyone knows a way around this requirement let me know). The scenario is that an Approver can click the Reviewed button in an email message to say that they have read the documents. They are taken to a modified new item form in a custom list and they click OK and the system records the necessary data. Here’s what I had to do to make it work.

Create the Custom List

The custom list was very basic in the case. We needed to be able to track which Approver was clicking OK and what date and time they clicked it. Luckily, ANY list records the Created and Created By data for an item. I simply changed the Title field to DocumentID and the list was ready to roll.

Because of the weird bug I encountered, I had to create another field called Notes. It’s a simple text field with the default options.

Create the Button

In my scenario, the button was to appear inside of an Outlook email - but you can use this logic for a button placed almost anywhere. The key was that we were using the URL to pass the variables to the form, so the button was a hyperlink to the new item form.

I created a button in photoshop and uploaded the image to a SharePoint picture library and grabbed the URL to the image. I then started by creating the following link in the email (part of a workflow):

<a href=”http://yoursharepointaddress/lists/customlistname/newitem.aspx?DocumentID=

At this point, I inserted a variable from the workflow. The workflow which is sending the email to the Approvers already ‘knows’ which DocumentID we are refering to. Therefore the code continued like this:

<a href=http://yoursharepointaddress/lists/customlistname/newitem.aspx?DocumentID=[DocumentIDVariable] target=”_blank”><img src=http://locationofyourimage /></a>

When the user clicks on the button image, it opens a new browser window and takes them to the specified URL. You can pass any variables that you want through the URL. The URL contains the DocumentID variable which we will make use of in the next step.

Create a New Item Form

I used SharePoint Designer (SPD) to edit the newitem.aspx file for the new custom list. I hid the default web part from view and then I added a new dataview. I linked the new dataview to the new custom list I created and inserted the DocumentID and Notes fields as a New Item Form (I will probably write something more detailed about these steps in the future - but the help files on the Microsoft website are perfect at explaining the basics).

I then changed to the DocumentID field on the new form to be a label and changed the Visible property to be False.

I created a new parameter in the Common Dataview Tasks and named that parameter DocumentID and set it to grab the DocumentID from the URL (Microsoft Help files on Dataviews). Remember the name of this parameter.

Now we get into the nitty-gritty. You MUST set the default value for the field in the actual code for the page and not in the properties for the field. I switched SPD to code view and located the code for the DocumentID field (sometimes it’s easier to set the view to Split mode and then click on the field to highlight the appropriate code). The code I added is highlighted:

<asp:TextBox runat=”server” id=”ff1{$Pos}” __designer:bind=”{ddwrt:DataBind(’i',concat(’ff1′,$Pos),’Text’,'TextChanged’,'ID’,ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),’@Title’)}” text=”{$DocumentID}” Visible=”False” Width=”21px” Height=”16px” />

The code I added sets the value of the ‘text’ to be the DocumentID parameter we created earlier (make sure you include the punctuation exactly as I have above. Save your new form and you are ready to test it.

Verify what you did

If you followed the previous steps you should now have the following:

1. A hyperlink button you can place anywhere (on a site, in an email, etc.) that passes values through the URL.
2. A customised new item form that takes the variable from the URL and populates a hidden field. You can apply these steps to any list you have.
3. When the user clicks the button, it opens the custom form. The user then clicks OK on the custom form and the new item is created in the list.

As you may have realised by now, this is a truly powerful tool for getting information back from your users. I hope to come back at some point an elaborate on some of the earlier steps, but in the meantime, I recommend reading the Microsoft helpfiles - specifically those on the SharePoint Dataviews.

Thanks for reading.