Chapter 4. Customizing and Implementing Property Types in Windows SharePoint Services

SharePoint is all about user empowerment. One of the best features SharePoint has to empower users is its lists. Users can quickly and easily create a list to hold documents, issues, tasks, announcements, events, and more; the variety of default lists is quite extensive. Every list in SharePoint can have properties. In this chapter, we will discuss a limitation of properties and a way to overcome that limitation.

Ten different property types can be created for any given list. Share-Point offers a wide and varied selection of list properties. Users can create text, date, lookup, hyperlink, and calculated fields, among others. Even though SharePoint gives us so many choices, it always seems like we need something that isn't native to SharePoint. Sure, we can achieve much with something like a text field. Radio buttons give the users a nice way to understand what they are sending to the system. Even a lookup field is fairly robust, until you need to look up data in lists on other sites or other systems. These default elements and others provided in Share-Point are pretty generic and limited.

What about when you need that certain special data or functionality that is ubiquitous throughout several other popular applications in your organization? Perhaps everything in your organization has a job number associated with it. Perhaps your document in SharePoint would benefit from being associated with a particular job number. From the business and user perspective, not being able to implement this custom property type can be a showstopper.

The first several pages of the chapter are dedicated to showing you the principles of customizing a property type to better serve the ever-changing needs of a business organization. This custom property type is then used in an implementation example. The bulk of the chapter guides you through implementing a custom property in a document library. This process is very similar for other lists, as well. Although the example used here focuses exclusively on document libraries, after completing the chapter, you should feel confident to explore this approach with other lists. The beauty of this method is that the patterns applied here can be applied to just about any other situation where a "custom" property type is required.