Lists/ Libraries – Page 2 – SharePoint Stuff

Problems creating list or library views based on created date

April 16, 2019December 24, 2021AnthonyLeave a comment

The situation

Data retention and deletion…I’m sure this is a something that anyone involved in Office 365, SharePoint on information management in general gets fed up of saying since the recent GDPR legislation!

Recently we have been rationalising and cleaning up our data in preparation for moving to Office 365. We are starting with SharePoint as the first target repository or silo of content.

The general consensus is to delete files and folders over 7 years old unless there is a pre-existing data retention policy to adhere to. So the next task is to identify those files that fall within our threshold, and ultimately delete.

Luckily, we have Tree Size Pro and ShareGate so I was able to relatively easily identify the files in question (there were a lot!).

The setup

As our SharePoint environment is a) rather full; and b) rather old, I made the decision to incrementally delete files rather than en-masse to mitigate risk, targeting the lists/libraries containing the most out of date content. I started by creating a view in the first library – library A with the following parameters:

Standard library view
Filtered by Created Date if less than or equal to 01/01/2011
Folders or Flat: Show items inside folders
Show this view: In all folders
(all other settings are left default)

Results this returned looked good, I could see folders and files in this view that matched the criteria – brilliant! Based on my previous statement I decided to delete in batches out of working hours, again to mitigate risk. I deleted first from library A, then from the first stage and finally from the second stage recycle bin all in this fashion.

The problem

I had permanently deleted around 50% of the total volume of content to be deleted from library A when we started to receive reports of current files being ‘missing’ from library A…not a good day.

After these reports were investigated they were indeed true. It turns out that when folders are included within a library view, folders that match the filter will be shown in the view, regardless of whether the files inside match.

We tested the view exluding folders and all the files returned matched the filter criteria. The same results were demonstrated from a SharGate report of the same nature. The report of all files over 7 years old brought back folders over 7 years old, but they also contained files that were newer.

Conclusion

At present, we are not entirely sure as to why these filters are not able to drill down past a top-level folder. It appears to be difficult to specify via view settings to only show files within folders, including the folder itself that matches the criteria.

We have decided to omitt folders from our reports and views going forward and to solely focus on files as this is the most reliable way we can delete files.

Bonus: for those of you with ShareGate, heres an example of my report we created to bring back all files over 7 years old, excluding folders. I ran this report across the entire intranet application over a weekend and it worked a treat 🙂

Fix pages with no publishing options in SharePoint

March 18, 2019April 22, 2019AnthonyLeave a comment

(This post was written using a SharePoint 2010 environment)

So you’ve got a SharePoint site, it all looks good (well, as good as it can!) but you notice that the Publish tab isn’t available in the ribbon.

First things first you check the site settings to see if SharePoint Server Publishing is turned on.

If you get to this point and your still no further forward it’s likely that your site wasn’t set up as a publishing site, but if you follow the steps below and your pages will be able to be published in no time.

Open the site in question, then go to Site Actions > View All Site Content
Open the SitePages library
Under Library Tools > Library, select Library Settings
Under General Settings > Versioning Settings, turn on Create major and minor (draft) versions > press OK
Go back to the original page, you will now see the publishing tab has appeared!

Microsoft 365 update for February 2019

March 4, 2019April 4, 2019AnthonyLeave a comment

Take a look at some of the best bits for the improvements and enhancements to Microsoft 365 throughout February:

SharePoint

SharePoint Migration Tool updates

The SharePoint migration tool now supports migrating content types and managed metadata term stores for SharePoint Server 2013. Global tenant admin permissions are required to do so.

Also, many of the on-premises SharePoint web parts can be migrated into Microsoft 365. Examples being blogs, chart viewer, content search, list form, list view media plus many more.

You can now pretty much migrate every element of a SharePoint site that is most important to you such as web parts, pages and site navigation.

Find out more: full list of supported web parts
Find out more: new and improved features of the SharePoint Migration Tool

Drag and drop to re-order the left-hand site navigation

You can now re-arrange the order of your site navigation elements with a nice, user friendly drag and drop gesture. This removes the multiple clicks involved in he ellipsis, move up or down options of old. This new gesture also works for dragging/dropping into a sub-navigation location.

*Drag and drop the left-hand site navigation*

Bulk check in/out

This one I’ve been waiting for awhile for! You will soon be able to check in/out multiple files at the same time form the modern ribbon in a document library.

File signals

File signals or status icons are being added into SharePoint to add visual clues regarding the status of a file, such as check-out status, sharing, DLP blocks or missing metadata. This applies to modern lists and libraries.

Column totals

A revamp of an old favorite, column totals and subtotals are coming to modern lists and libraries. These totals and subtotals are displayed in the footer. This is a welcome change from the old total count in classic views!

Add columns between columns and drag and drop

You can now insert new columns in place between existing in and modern list or library view, plus move a column around by simply dragging the header to a new location in the view.

*Adding a column between an existing column in a modern SharePoint list or library*

Smarter file hover cards

The file hover card gives you a sneak peek into your most important files. Now, as soon as your hover over a file you will be able to see important stats like number of views, who’s viewed and who’s modified. This functionality is now being extended to almost all file types.

This new experience will also appear for files listed in your Shared by Me view.

Find out more: file hover cards are getting smarter and is now available for all file types!

*Hover over a file in a SharePoint library or OneDrive folder to see more information about a file*

Microsoft Teams

Priority notifications and message delegation

Priority notification alerts will notify a recipient to an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices and repeat the alert every two minutes for up to 20 minutes, until a response is received.

Also coming soon is message delegation. Message delegation enables a recipient to delegate messages to another colleague when they are unavailable.

Priority notifications are currently in private preview.

Find out more: New capabilities in Microsoft 365 empower healthcare professionals

Microsoft Authenticator

Microsoft Authenticator allows you to receive security notifications for important events on your personal Microsoft Account. When you receive a notification, you can quickly view your account activity to take action if needed.

Microsoft Authenticator can be used to add two-step verification for added security if needed. It supports fingerprint, face ID or PIN authentication.

Find out more: Microsoft Authenticator app now sends security notifications

Links and resources

The SharePoint Community Blog – SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop February 2019
New in Microsoft 365 – Update for February 2019

Ways around the 10 item number order limit in choice columns

October 22, 2018February 6, 2019Anthony1 Comment

I was recently updating a view in a SharePoint List, the view was set up to use metadata fields to sort and group the content…lovely stuff. What I was required to do was to implement a choice field with a numerical order within it (i.e. 1. First step, 2. Second step, 3. Third step).

With sort order in List/Library views, it works with either alphabetical or numerical options ascending or descending. What I found was with choice fields operating as the number order, once you hit 10 the numbering system went out the window!

What you end up with is something like this:

1) First choice
11) Eleventh choice
12) Twelfth choice
2) Second choice
3) Third choice

and so on…

By default, SharePoint interperates the choice field as alphabetical so the way I got around this was to just use:

a)
b)
c)

This gets around any issues with numerical values over 10 or having to create lookup lists or anything else 🙂

How to find open with explorer in modern SharePoint libraries

August 6, 2018August 27, 2019Anthony3 Comments

Explorer view in classic SharePoint sites has been a widely used bypass for users actually interacting with SharePoint libraries for a number of years.

Now in some cases that’s for good reason, from being able to upload multiple files easily in older versions of SharePoint to a familiar navigation of nested folder structure.

With modern SharePoint libraries, the old school ribbon has gone the way of the dodo…and so it seemed had open with explorer.

But fear not! If you still use IE you can still use the trusty open with explorer

How to open with explorer

Go to the library that you wish to open with explorer
On the right-hand side, press the drop-down icon next to all documents
Press View in File Explorer

Some weird stuff will then happen, where a classic 2013 version of your SharePoint site/library will open in a new tab and for me I got a message at the bottom of the browser window to allow popups from Microsoft then got another, more serious popup like this (multiple times):

I pressed allow to all of these then voila! we have file explorer!

PLEASE NOTE:

File explorer only works for Internet Explorer, I tested in IE11 and it categorically doesn’t work in Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Edge Dev (beta).

Creating a new item from SharePoint Workflow – trailing space issue

July 5, 2018February 6, 2019AnthonyLeave a comment

I wanted to post this as I was banging my head against a brick wall for hours recently with this issue. Full credit goes to this stack overflow thread that described pretty much exactly what I was experiencing:

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/112353/spd-2010-workflow-intermittent-item-creation-issue

However, my situation was a little different so thought I would post this in case it helps someone else in future!

The details

SharePoint 2010 environment using a standard SharePoint Designer workflow. Straight-forward workflow that runs once a list item is created, creates a document set in a separate library, then updates the list item with a link to the document set (plus some other item metadata). All this is wrapped up in an impersonation step that uses a site collection admin user account.

Why an impersonation step?

An impersonation step is being used because when you create a new list item using a workflow, that new item is created by the System Account. So on any new item created by a workflow, “Start workflow on create” will not work because system account is not allowed to start a workflow.

The problem

Intermittently the workflow would fail on creating the document set. The workflow status showed “The workflow could not create the list item. Make sure the list exists and the user has permissions to add items to the list.”. The outcome is “Unknown Error”.

After speaking with users this didn’t seem to affect everyone all of the time. It only affected some people occasionally but it was affecting one user way more than others.

This user was creating the list item in exactly the same way as others in the team. I overserved the user creating the list item and couldn’t see any problems with how it was being done. Yet each time we conducted a test copying field information from an existing item the workflow continued to error.

The solution

In my case, when I started to look at the list items where the workflow had failed, I noticed that the Name field for each list item contained a trailing space at the end of the text. I asked the user who this issue consistently affected to try creating new list items several times, copying the Name as normal but this time removing the trailing space and we no longer had issues!

Moral of the story…check for trailing spaces and beware!

Hide a SharePoint list or library from view all site contents

June 12, 2018February 6, 2019AnthonyLeave a comment

Have you ever been asked to hide a list or library from a SharePoint site? If so, you go straight for selecting ‘no’ to displaying the list or library on the Quick Launch or removing it from the navigation. However, your eagle eyed users notice the handy view all site contents option and see that it is still listed there – they want it gone!

Luckily, all you need is SharePoint Designer and it is as simple as a click of a button…

(These steps were created using SharePoint Server 2010)

Open the site that where list or library resides in SharePoint Designer
Under Lists and Libraries – Select the list or library you wish to hide
On the main list settings page – find the Settings section
Check the Hide from browser option

Thats it! when you option the view all site content page now, that list or library will no longer be showing. Also, if you want to re-instate it at a later date, just un-check the box and it will re-appear.

This also works for SharePoint 2013, 2016 and SharePoint Online, under the site contents page.

Fun with PowerApps part 3: my first PowerApp

February 4, 2018Anthony1 Comment

This is part three in my fun with PowerApps series where I’ll go through my personal experience of creating a new PowerApp from scratch and go through step-by-step for each part of the process…

You can read all parts of this series below:

Part 1: setting up the default gateway
Part 2: creating a data connection

Carrying on from my last post – creating a data connection, we are now good to go and begin to build our first PowerApp!

Just like setting up the data connection, creating a PowerApp can be a really simple thing to do.

However, I’ve found either creating a PowerApp from the SharePoint list or library is really quick and easy, but it doesn’t necessarily give you the most flexibility when it comes to wanting to do it your own way…

Creating a PowerApp

You can create a PowerApp from a list or library literally from the push of a button! Its as simple as:

Create your list or library, add all the associated columns and data you wish to be displayed in your PowerApp
Press the ‘PowerApps’ button on the list menu, then press ‘Create an app’

You’ll then be prompted to create your app, start by giving it a name and press ‘Create’

After a few moments your app will be created! It will open in the PowerApps web editor and you should see your list columns and data displaying in your shiny new PowerApp!

You can also take a look at the app in the preview to get a good look at how it operates and how the data is displayed…

Conclusion…

That’s it! Your all set…but if you’re like me you’ll have some questions. Like, what if I want a desktop app and not a mobile one?

Well for that you’ll need to build an app from scratch, I’ll be going over creating a new PowerApp in the next part of this series so hold on as i’ll be posted the next part very soon!

Page declared a record or placed on hold and is read-only

October 17, 2017February 6, 2019AnthonyLeave a comment

If you’ve ever been in the situation where you try to edit a page in SharePoint and you see this seemingly unchangeable message appear at the top of the page stating:

“Page has been declared a record or placed on hold and is read-only”

Fear not! I’ve seen this message appear and it usually occurs when a user (or service account) is operating as a system account. This could have been set manually by said user if they have access to the web application via central admin:

If this is the case, you can overwrite the system account check in via SharePoint Designer. You’ll obviously need the correct permissions to access SPD beforehand! In the following example I’m using a SharePoint 2010 environment. To do this:

Connect to your web application in SharePoint Designer
Navigate to All Files – Pages
Right-click on the page that is currently locked
Undo checkout

NOTE: You won’t be able to view the individual pages within each Page Library if you navigate through Lists and Libraries. This space is used to view and manage the settings for each list type you have. All Files takes you to the ‘root’ of your web application, where you can see everything that sits under the web application.