Despite the miserable roads, we had a good crowd show up for Kirk‘s talk. The deck should be available shortly. Also, thanks to ITAGroup for hosting and to Todd for making the trip with some books to give away. Enjoy the holidays and we hope to see you in February!
I was also asked two good questions during the break, which I thought I would share here:
Q: What’s the best way to hide a list field?
A: There are a lot of examples online of using SPD to replace the default new/edit/display list forms, but they are clumsy, break support for attachments (unsupported hack and hotfix notwithstanding), and require customizing (unghosting) the page.
An easier solution is to leverage these properties of SPField:
- ShowInDisplayForm
- ShowInEditForm
- ShowInListSettings
- ShowInNewForm
- ShowInVersionHistory
- ShowInViewForms
These values can be set in a feature receiver or a simple console application, but it’s trivial with PowerShell, as Christian Lessner shows here. Or if you’re writing a feature for a custom content type/list template, the FieldRef element has a similar set of attributes.
Q: Is it possible to e-mail an item in a document library as part of an SPD workflow?
A: While not supported out of the box, I figured it would be possible through custom code. Kirk pointed me to the SPDActivities project on CodePlex, which has an activity to Send Email with List Item attachments. I’m not sure if it works for files in a document library, but it should be an easy fix if it doesn’t.
Solutionizing .NET 