Document Information Panel

Hide a custom field from the Document Information Panel

Andy Burns, , , 3 Comments

So, I’ve been working with a custom field type recently. It’s quite a complicated one – I’ll not go into details – but we did hit a problem with it. When a Word document was opened it would try to display our field in the Document Information Panel, which isn’t really possible, and caused Word to die in a horrible fashion. I forget the exact error we were getting, but it was something to do with the XSN being invalid.

What we really needed was a way to set that the property wasn’t to be shown in the Document Information Panel. However, there is no easy way of doing this with a purely programmatically created column. There are properties on the SPField object that can be accessed programmatically, and the CAML for a FieldRef can set ShowInFileDlg – but there isn’t an obvious way to set this value from C# code.

Naturally, that’s what we wanted to do. Well, there is a combination approach – the SPField.SchemaXml property allows us to get/set the CAML that defines the field.

So, I came up with this static function:

static void SetShowInFileDlg(SPField f, bool value)
        {
            XmlDocument fieldSchemaXml = new XmlDocument();
            fieldSchemaXml.LoadXml(f.SchemaXml);
            XmlAttribute attr = fieldSchemaXml.CreateAttribute("ShowInFileDlg");
            attr.Value = value.ToString().ToUpper();
            XmlNode fieldXmlNode = fieldSchemaXml.SelectSingleNode("Field");
            XmlAttributeCollection fieldAttributes = fieldXmlNode.Attributes;
            fieldAttributes.Append(attr);

            f.SchemaXml = fieldXmlNode.OuterXml;
            f.Update(true);
        }

I’m not sure what happens if you’re trying to update an already widely used column – will it update all content types that that column – but this worked for us.

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Hide a custom field from the Document Information Panel

Missing Content Type fields in the Document Information Panel

Andy Burns, , , , 9 Comments

The Document Information Panel is great – it allows you to surface metadata to be filled in about a Word 2007 document in the client.

Document Information Panel Correct

This is great, but I had a bit of a puzzling problem. I’ve set Libraries up to use this features many times now, and it’s pretty straight forward – I’ve added columns to the library, and then the template document for the library has included those columns. Thus, you just go into your document library, click new, and you get a blank word document with the correct document information panel thing. Sometimes I’ve modified that template, but that’s pretty straight forward through the Library Settings pages (Document Library Settings > Advanced Settings > Edit Template).

This time, though, I was using content types (i.e. setting up the library properly), rather than just adding columns directly to a list. Content Types encapsulate (amongst other things) their own set of metadata to be captured – so in other words, they define columns to be added to a list. That’s fine (and very useful).

However, when I went to my document library, clicked ‘New’ and selected my Content Type, I got a blank word document with only one field in the document information panel – title. The blankness was expected (I’d not defined my own template) but none of the other bits of metadata I’d defined for my content type were there. This was a bit of a puzzle. What was different?

Well, after much thinking, I realised something – Content Types ‘inherit’ from each other. My Content Type derived from the Document content type, which specified just one field of metadata – Title. Then it hit me – content types themselves have document templates. My new content type was inheriting from Document, and it was still using the Document content type’s template document. I specified my own template document for my content type and suddenly I had all of my fields available in the document information panel.

It is interesting that there is this difference between the document information panel fields being defined by the library when just using the default ‘Document‘ content type and no others, and the fields being defined by the content type you’ve created if you’re using other types (I.e. you’ve enabled ‘Allow management of content types’ on the Document Library Settings > Advanced Settings page).

Related to this, then, is the question of what happen if you add a column to a list. However, I’ll cover this in another post.

Missing Content Type fields in the Document Information Panel