What Is a List?


Virtually everything stored in SharePoint is in some form of a list. Lists can contain a variety of content, from customer contact information to recipes for your favorite dishes. They are similar to databases, and provide reports and views of the information stored in them. They are very easy to construct and require no special tools or knowledge, which makes them an ideal information store for most organizations and teams.

Understanding List Elements

Lists have item, fields, and views. Items and fields correspond to the rows and columns that you see on grid layout that you often see in spreadsheets or databases. Views present list data in a friendlier format that acts very similar to a report.

  • Items:   An item, or record, is a row in a database. For example, for a list that stores information on customers, each customer may have a unique item in the list, which is also called the customer row or customer record.

  • Fields:   A field is a column in a database. You may also see a column referred to as metadata, which really contains the details of a row’s information. A customer item in a list, for example, contains the phone number, physical address, billing address, and email address.

  • Views:   A single list can have multiple views. You create a view to address a user’s informational needs relating to list data. A view displays a subset of information from the list, for example customers who have been added during a specific time period. You may also create a view to show all information on a list, but have items displayed in a predefined order.

Discovering SharePoint List Types

SharePoint lists can have the following types of information stored in columns:

  • Single Line of Text:   Possibly the most common, because it stores a variety of formats, such as the item’s title, names, phone numbers, email addresses, and virtually anything else that you can enter into a single line text box.

  • Multiple Lines of Text:   Occasionally, this type of column is useful because it stores larger amounts of information, such as a customer’s billing address or background information on the customer. For this column type, you can select whether the information should contain plain, rich, or enhanced text elements, such as bold, italic, pictures, or tables. You can expand this column as you add text to it or you can select how many lines in the box to display initially. When you use this field to collect information from users, it is a good idea to determine the number of lines to display so users will know how much content is expected from them.

  • Choice:   When gathering information on an item, you can offer users a selection of values or answers from which to choose. Using the example of a customer list, you may want to find out what type of services the customer purchases from you. If your organization provides only a fixed number of key services, it makes sense to present the user this set of choices to ensure that the field always contains valid information. When creating a choice column, you can select whether to have the choices appear in a drop-down list, as radio buttons, or as check boxes. For check boxes, the user may select more than one item. Alternatively, you can have users fill in their own choices if their items do not appear in the list. This is known as allowing “fill-in choices.”

  • Number:   You commonly need to associate numerical information with an item so that you can later perform calculations on the information stored in them. You can configure number columns to store numbers that fall within a specific range or percentage values.

  • Currency:   This is similar to the number column, but specifically displays financial or monetary values. You can select what type of currency to display and the appropriate format based on region such as $123,000.00 for the United States or £123,000.00 for the United Kingdom.

  • Date and Time:   You typically have a list containing dates or times. This might include when an organization first became a customer or the last time it purchased a product. Date columns allow users to enter the date information directly into a text box or select the date from an easy-to-use calendar tool. When configuring a date column, you can control whether to allow only dates or dates with times. You can also select a default value for the date, including a special value that detects “Today’s Date” as the user is filling out the item.

  • Lookup:   As your SharePoint environment expands, you may have many lists containing important information about things such as projects, products, and employees. In some cases you need to take information from one list and associate it with information from another. In the example of the customers list, you may have a listing of projects that display the name of the customer for which that project is being completed. Because your customers list will contain that information, it makes sense to have a column in the projects list that displays the names of all the customers. Lookup columns encourage users to store information in a single location rather than duplicate items throughout the organization. New in SharePoint 2007 is the ability to select multiple items from a lookup column.

  • Yes/No:   This check box column indicates whether an item matches a specific criterion. In the case of the customers list, you may create a Yes/No column named Active. If the customer is active, you select the check box. If the customer is not active, then the check box remains blank.

  • Person or Group:   SharePoint 2007 introduces a new type of column that associates specific people or groups of people with an item. Users can select people or groups from the site’s membership source (for example, Active Directory) and associate them with items in a list. In the customers list example, you may use this column type to associate an account manager with a customer. Optionally, you can include a display picture along with the account manager’s name.

  • Hyperlink or Picture:   You can use this column type to enter a website address into a list item to create a hyperlink or display an image located at the source location. In the customer list example, you can use this type of column to display the company’s website address or the company’s logo.

  • Calculated:   Rather than have users manually enter information, you may want to calculate values based on other columns within the list. For this type of column, you can select the names of other columns from the list and identify relationships and formulas. For example, you may have a calculated value that displays how many years the customer has been a client of the organization based on other information in the customer record. You can then select a format for the column.

  • Business Data:   This is a tool that accesses enterprise data from other lines of business systems directly from your SharePoint sites. In some cases, you may want to associate business data from the catalog with your list items. For example, you may have a listing of all products in a sales database and instead of recreating it in SharePoint, you can connect to and reuse that information. Using a Business Data column, you can associate a products list with your list so that as you define customers, you can also select which products the customer typically purchases.

    Tip 

    For more on the Enterprise feature, see Chapters 1 and 8. Chapter 12 is dedicated to the Business Data Catalog and its various functions.

  • Publishing:   Numerous special publishing columns in SharePoint 2007 are specifically intended to create content to display on web pages. You can create these columns on any site that has the Publishing feature enabled.

    Tip 

    Chapter 13 is dedicated to the Publishing feature and Web Content Management.

  • Audiences:   If a list has audience targeting enabled, this column type is automatically added to it. Audiences are groups of users that you define based on a set of criteria. When you use audiences on list items, the items appear only to members of the audiences associated with the item.

    Tip 

    Chapter 9 gives in depth information on audiences and user profiles.




Beginning SharePoint 2007. Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007
Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Programmer to Programmer)
ISBN: 0470124490
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 131

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