Tomblog » Tricks

SharePoint Tricks: Allow Duplicate Column Names

Tombo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:02:20 +0000

One of the restrictions of SharePoint I always stumbled upon when clicking a SharePoint site together was the one of duplicate column names. I bet you’ve all seen it. You’re creating some columns (list or site ones) and suddenly SharePoint gives you this error:

SharePoint Tricks: Duplicate column name error

I finally got pissed at this problem, so I decided to investigate. Now, as I developed some columns through the feature framework, I knew it was possible to create columns with the same name, Display Name that is. Just look at Title. How many different “Title” columns can you see in the edit view screen? So I decided to take a look in the fldnew.aspx page, and what did I discover? A nice javascript array with all “forbidden” column names. I tried to make that array empty and tried again. Magic! The column name was approved. For some reason the team decided to block duplicate names off. But I feel this can be handy some times, especially when creating site columns. You are bound to hit this limitation some time.

But what does SharePoint do internally? It will always make a unique internal name (eg. if you enter Title, it will create a field with Title0 as internal name and Title as display name) A good practice however is to first create a field with a “good” internal name. Good meaning, no spaces, no weird characters, clear. And afterwards renaming it using this trick. Now, what is the trick you will ask? Well, quite simply: once the fldnew.aspx or fldedit.aspx page is loaded. Head toward the address bar of your browser and enter following javascript.

javascript:g_FieldName={};alert('ok');

This code will clear the “forbidden” column names array and give you a visual confirmation when you can go on.

I hope this little trick will help some of you guys. Use it with wisedom however. ’till next time!

SharePoint Tricks: Content By Query for Single Web

Tombo — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:06:11 +0000

Quick little trick tonight for all you SharePoint configurators out there. Ever needed to use the Content by Query Webpart and query for just a single site? Yes? Well, then you probably ‘ve noticed there is no such option when configuring the webpart… right?

Content by Query Source Options

Wrong! There is a way to enable single site quering, and it’s actually not that hard. First thing you have to do is export your webpart to a file. Open your .webpart file and add (or replace the old one with) this little property:

<Webs /;>
This property will, as its name suggests, override the webs property of the sitedataquery. By default the content by query webpart will fill this in with SiteCollection or Recursive. But if you don’t want this, just overwrite it with this (empty) Webs value.
After adjusting your file, upload it back to your page, and add an instance of your new webpart. And there you have it, single site goodness.

Hope it helps! Good night.

SharePoint Tricks: Adding Google Search To Search Scopes

Tombo — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:54:56 +0000

Tonight’s article is one based on a little trick I pulled of last year at one of my customer’s Intranet. As it turns out, there seems to be quite some people using Google Search (Live Search anyone?)
So how do we add this search scope? The trick lies in a custom page for the search scope. When creating a search scope in your site collection settings, you’re allowed to enter a custom search page.

This custom search page simply has to redirect to the google query webpage: eg.http://www.google.com/search?q=ENTER+A+WORD. Don’t forget to replace the ENTER+A+WORD content of the q variable with the k variable you find in the query string of the custom page. This is whare all the magic lies, you see. So in the end, we’re basicly rerouting the query from SharePoint to Google. Pretty simple, but very effective!

Hope you guys liked the trick. See you next time!