Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 20 Jul 2023

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From YouTube: Referencing Content Types in List Formatting definitions

Description

📺 In this 17 minute demo, Chris walks us through some more List formatting magic! In the Content Type Gallery, create a new content type. In a SharePoint list, enable the allow management of content types in list settings to then add content types through the add columns menu and customize its options to get a view and add these columns to that view. Also delete the item content type on that list. Add items of different content types to the same list and start to format the view with conditional rules. Enhance that experience with Advanced mode and manipulate the JSON code. Create a board view and get the content type into it!

This community call demo is taken from the bi-weekly Microsoft 365 & Power Platform community call 20th of July 2023. Join the next one by downloading invite from https://aka.ms/community/calls.

✨ Presenter
Chris Kent (Takeda) | @TheChrisKent

📖 Learn more
• PnP List Formatting repository: https://github.com/pnp/List-Formatting

💡 Learn more about the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform community
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform - http://aka.ms/community/home

Sharing is caring! You are awesome! 🧡

A

Foreign I'm Chris Let's- uh let's talk about some uh list stuff can be exciting all right, so we head over to our I, know get out of here all right. So let's uh get rid of David here all right, so we're on a classic Warrior horses site and the uh the horses have noticed um a pattern uh in their sleep lately right so they've decided to start keeping a dream diary uh to see what they can do with that and kind of analyze.

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What's going on and uh man I wish, I had turned on Focus mode: oh I did but I don't know all right to create a list for that, but we're not going to dream diary that uh that's no good for warrior horses, so we'll call it uh something more. Generic say uh night time think thinks that sounds good and we created without the spaces there so that it creates the URL the way I want it and then I go ahead and see that it even knew it for a second there.

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So I'm gonna go ahead and click on it and we're gonna blah blah blah I'm, not even sure, if that's necessary anymore, all right. Let's save that boom nighttime think things now for our nighttime think things we're gonna, be tracking both dreams and nightmares all right. So one of the things I've done ahead of this call is I, went over to my content, type Hub. You can believe it, so you have a content type Hub too. So it is at your.

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You can read that tiny URL, it's a content, type Hub, so it's a site, slash content, type Hub. There you'll find this very exciting site uh which really isn't for anything but the content type. So if we go to site settings, we can see our content type Gallery here. If I go into our site, content types and you'll see there are some. It's a weird mix, we're going to be seeing today in some of these screens uh very old school uh with modern right. So it's it's a real mix.

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Here, sorry, we could return to Classic but in this case right any content types we do here. We can actually publish out to our various sites. There have been a lot of changes thanks to syntax and some other things to make all that work. But this is all included with your standard licensing, so wow. So that's great news all right.

A

So what we're going to do is we've got a content, type I've already created right, so we were to take our category and we're going to filter just so we can see them here and we'll go to horses, we'll apply that so I've got this dream. Content type I've gone ahead and create it. So what I can do is I can head back over here to our nighttime think things and when I hit add column, you'll notice, I, don't have any real options here.

A

But if I go first to my list settings again we're going to go to this classic settings for the mix of our modern settings, we'll go to our classic thing here: go to advanced settings and I'm going to say, allow management of content types, and this is kind of what it's saying here and we're just going to hey. Okay, all right boom. Now we go back to our list and now we could have tried to go the traditional way of adding content types and all that stuff.

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This is the way to you're going to want to do it now right, so you can add column now, we've done that we have this add a content type, so we're going to click that and now we're going to see all our content types that are available. uh You know these are from the content type Hub. These do not exist on this site right, so we can add our Dream content type. Now we could just hit apply, um it'll, add it, but we have a couple other options. If we click it one we can preview.

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What's in here, we can see exact columns that are in here and we get these two options. So by default, it's going to add a view. That's just going to filter on that content. Type I like that, we're going to keep it and then to save time, I'm going to go ahead and add the columns to current view.

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If you don't do that, you're gonna have to go at them manually right, so I'm going to hit, apply and wait a second here, while it adds that content type and adds those columns to our view and boom. It says the there we go now: we've got some exciting columns here. That's great! Thank you all right so boom. Now we got that that's cool and so, let's add a uh a dream here. So, let's just add a friendly, Little Dream for fun all right.

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So we have new item new dream, which is not quite we want we'll come back to that. So we've got a new dream here and we're just gonna say this is rainbows and butterflies. That sounds great and uh you know it was beautiful.

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Butterflies did stuff, it doesn't matter right, and this happened uh tonight. Apparently we're gonna dream about this tonight. What were we eating? We had some oats all right and we encountered three rainbows and we uh slaughtered two enemies. It was a wonderful dream. I'm Gonna Save that so that's great. So now we've got one of these. But what if we want to do you know nightmares? We've enabled content types for a reason right. So it's a little arbitrary but we're going to add a new content type called nightmare.

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So if we go back to our content, type Gallery I'm going to create a content type and call this a nightmare. Ryan will say: put this in horses and our parent category is going to be list content types and we're just going to pick an item there. We go we're not going to do any fancy inheritance with the dream all right. So now, we've got a nightmare and we're going to add our site. Columns from existing site columns go to our categories.

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We're gonna, go to horses all right and now we're going to add some of those same kind of columns we had before right. So we already have the title that comes from item so I'm going to add Vision uh and then what does we have at night right so that the night that the thing happened? What snack they were eating? But then we don't care about rainbows encountered or enemy Slaughter right. This is a this is a nightmare.

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Instead, we want to know how many hooves are severed right and where the Clown's present perfect all right. So, let's save that there we go now. We've got a content type and we're just going to publish that go ahead and make that available. Wow, let's see what we got here boom so now, if we go back to our site well, our nighttime thing thinks all right and let's see uh I'm just going to refresh to make sure all right. So we refresh and we're going to say you know that same uh add column menu.

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Let's click it that way, so we can say add a content type or you can see. We already have dream loaded, but now we should see nightmare so we had nightmare. We did the same thing. We did before I'm, not going to add the columns to the current view. That's fine because we already have most of those columns and I. Don't really want these showing up just yet okay.

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So here we go now we're going to add that all right, let's go, add that content type and one thing that we're going to want to do just to kind of clean. This up is you know, I, don't want item in there right, I just want my dream and my nightmare. So I'm going to go back to my list settings that classic settings and I'm going to go down here to the item content type- and this is the copy for the list. I'm going to say, delete this content type I'm, just deleting the item.

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Content type on this particular list, so no worries all right. So now, when I do that now, I don't have that in the drop down right. I just have the two things dream and Nightmare. So that's awesome! So, let's add a nightmare and I will call it a rabbit attack all right. This is dang rabbits. They had saws and said mean thanks those dang rabbits, all right. That's great and we'll say man. We read some some casserole. That probably explains a lot of them.

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They severed three three holes, but there were no clowns all right, so we're gonna, save that and let's add one more nightmare here. Just for fun all right, we'll just say: uh Jay died. Rubio that sounds great Krause I would call that girls and we were definitely more that casserole or we'll say we're eating some oats. This time right, uh no hoes are sever, but they were definitely clowns present all right, so we're gonna save that all right.

A

So the idea here is: um we've got this right, so maybe we've we're gonna eliminate some of these columns that are, you know, are specific to a column type. So let's go here and we can hide the column or we can go. It'll show hide columns and we'll just do it quicker all right. Let's remove those two off of there. So one of the things here is it's not very easy to distinguish between these right, and this is a formatting demo. So let's talk about how we're going to format these right.

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So let's come up here and let's format, the current View. Now one of the things we can do is very quickly. We can manage our rules here, which is very cool where we can add conditional rules where we say like by default. Don't do anything right, but let's say: if it's a nightmare, we want to do something. Well, unfortunately, content type isn't a choice here unless we specifically add it as a column.

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So for now we're just going to pick a random one, because we're going to swap it out a minute, we're going to say e is equal to nightmare. Obviously, that's not going to do anything because we're not having any titles that are equal to nightmare, but we're going to do is we're going to say more styles and let's say no Styles. The only thing we want to do is add a border on the left right and we'll say nice and thick and we'll make it uh this red color beautiful.

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So we save that it's not going to do anything because we didn't actually have content type, but if we wanted to actually do something on content type. Now that we've done that we go to advanced mode where we can see it generated the Json for us with exactly what we want. The difference is set a link title. We don't want that.

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We want it to be content type so to preview that Boop there we go now our nightmares have this little red border, so we can easily distinguish them, even though we don't have any other columns that are showing that which is really cool all right. So we can save that. The idea here is. We could rewrite this as Excel style thing, but why not keep their weird operator operand stuff, because it's easy to update now I could also reference content type ID all right.

A

Let's talk about a capital I and a lowercase D in here and I could reference it by the guide. Part of the issue with the good is that will not be the good of the content type from The Hub that'll be the full guide of the local copy of the content type in your list. Now you could easily do it like a starts with to do some of that ID I highly recommend just not messing with that. Just use the internal name with content type. The nice thing is again: it's not part of the view.

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You don't have to add it to the view. It's always available so wow, so there we go. There's our additional row class very exciting, but let's go a little further all right.

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So let's say we want to create a new view and before I create this I am actually going to add those columns back here, because there's a weird thing with the uh The View I want to add, where it's not going to add those columns unless they're part of the one you copied the view from so I'm just going to copy all of those for now. I'm going to hit apply right, and one thing also to note is that this column, the site column, had a format associated with this custom format.

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Right that shows this cloud or not, and all that came down and if, if I updated, the site column on the content, type level that will get published down and the publishing just takes 45 minutes to an hour. Although you can go to your content types here and hit update. So just keep that in mind. If you're looking for something a little quicker again check out the documentation on that but Okay. So we've got this I'm going to create a new view. All right, so I've got my dream and my nightmare.

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Those are the views that create it automatically right and that's what the content type that was, that check box. One thing I like to do on these by the way is just edit the current view, because it bugs me that it's called dream, because that was the name of the content. Type I just have a little s, it's very minor, but uh it makes me feel better all right. So now we've got the idea of Dreams um rather than dream right.

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So let's go back to our all items View and now, let's create a new view and we're going to create a board view right and we're just going to call this uh snack distribution because we're pretty sure those snacks have a lot to do with this right.

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So we're going to do that based on the snack all right. So what that's going to do is going to create this lovely board View, and it's going to sort everything according to the snacks we were eating or the horses were eating before they went to bed and it's created these kind of card views and that's pretty cool right. We can actually drag these things around. We could say it wasn't oats. It was hey right and that's awesome, all right. It's going to update That Snack field and that's really cool.

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But again we don't really have the content type visible here in a way, I'd also want to say one weird thing is this: this plus button is going to add a the first content type right, so it'll add a dream. If you want to specifically choose one, you have to choose it up here, all right, but what we can do is we could say, customize card all right. We can say yeah. We want to show all these fields now.

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One thing to notice this empty cells will not be shown on the card right so by default. If you didn't fill out one of these things, um you know they're not going to show up here now. Ours are all required, so they're going to show up, but all that's really doing is. If you go to advanced mode, there's a display thing. You can just change the format for that. Okay, so that's going to show all of our things and that's very cool, but again we want to make a little more obvious.

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What's going on, so let's do that all right. So if we come over here, we've got this idea of our root level. Has this border right and we can say anything so maybe we just want to set a border around this to say when it's a nightmare, let's make it a red border right, so very similar. That way, we can see exactly what's a nightmare and what's not, uh we can go with it from there. So what we could do is we can add that stuff here.

A

So we've got this idea of classes that are being added. If you want to know more about these classes, we have this lovely grouping. So if you go to our main list, formatting site- and you go to groupings- so this is a way to sort samples by class, but one of the things I use it for is we list all of them regardless?

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If there are samples or not, so this is a great reference just to see what classes are available to you, as you can see, there's just a whole heck, a lot of them right all right. So let's come back here, but that is where we're getting those I think yeah David's got the link Perfect all right. So let's come back over here to our website and one other thing I want to note is some of these classes are very opinionated like border radius? Doesn't just set a border radius. It also turns the Border off.

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So what we're going to do is we're going to remove that, because we want the Border so I'm going to pull that out and when I do that it. Actually it's going to be very tiny border radius will not go to six, Ah that's terrible right. So if we really are sticklers, we want to match exactly right. We can restore the Border radius, two four pixels- to make it exactly that without that exciting class. Here, that's really all that one did so now.

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We've got our four pixels back, but that takes away the fact that we had no border that we could set. So what we want to do is we want to set that border right. So we've got a color here neutral light, and if we change that to red now we should see red shows up and that's cool right, and if we wanted to change the the size of that right, we can. We can say here and say border width and we could say what three pixels.

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We can really see it for our demo here, okay, but the problem is right. This is not conditional, it's on all of them, regardless of their nightmares or not. So let's change that right. So we don't want three red borders. We want to make that conditional so, instead of putting it right there, let's cut that and let's convert this from just a plane value to an expression.

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So the easiest thing to do is just put an equals and wrap those things in single quotes, and now we can add to that string right so say, plus and say: if and we say, content type like that equals equals right nightmare all right. Well, then, let's make it that red. We talked about right and if it's not that now, let's put a quote, then we're going to say uh what was that neutral? That sounds good neutral, so this will be themed based, neutral light.

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So now, if we do that, let's preview, aha, so now our dream has just that nice gray. So it's very easy to tell the difference again. You could go uh a lot crazy with this right. You get some cool icons. You could conditionally show things you could even fully remove. You know like have the cards be completely different uh per content type. This is a quick demo, so we're not going to do all that.

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But that's again, this is the basic pattern, though, where you're gonna just be investigating the content type and then setting Things based on that all right. So let's say that: let's do one more thing with this just for fun and that's that we're going to come over here and uh now, I just noticed it didn't bring our clowns present in as our as our column format reference. So that's easy to fix. If you ever want to go in there, you just hit column format.

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A reference was what's happening with snack, but we're going to skip it for now because of time, because I want to show you the other thing here, which is edit the current view. Oh one quick thing: there's some weird things that the board don't hit: customize cardigan. It will kill everything. So don't do that right or save. At least you want to format the current view to be able to get back to that. Okay, so there's a exciting tip.

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So let's format that current View and we're just going to add a little thing right up here and we're going to say command bar props right, because we want to do things with that say that we're gonna, that'll, comma Loop and we say our commands and so with our commands. This is just an array of commands. We want to apply things to we reference them with key. This is referencing these buttons up here. So in this case we care about the share right. So we don't want people sharing anything but their nightmares.

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We'll say that sounds exciting all right, and so the way we do, that is, we say, hide and right. So we could say just true and when we say true, the share button is gone right, but let's do that conditionally instead of true now, let's put this equals if and we're going to say, uh content type, we don't actually need the. If, because we just needed to reference it so we're gonna, say, content type, content type, all right in this case, I'm, actually going to say, not equals uh nightmare right.

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I know that's a little strange right. So the reason for that is now we don't have the share button up here right when I click, this I can share because it's a nightmare, but if I click this I can't share it. Because it's a dream- and the reason is this- is really weird because hide is true. Right so show is false, it's a little weird, so you just have to think through that logic, but the idea is, we don't have to write a full if statement or anything else.

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We just need a condition that evaluates true or false. Okay, so let's wrap it up and we're done here. Okay, one last thing: here again: I mentioned this idea that so I actually presented on this uh four and a half years ago. If you could believe it or not, and at that time, if you added content type, it broke everything. Now it's fine, it's fixed. So don't worry about that, but again I highly recommend using this. Not this, um though you can use both all right and last thing go check out the docs.

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There is a sample that shows how to reference all these things, the content type variations which will go through that it also has an emphasis on provisioning and how all that's supported, but again, all of the format and everything goes to the content type Hub as well. So it's an awesome way to use it and uh that's it. Wow.