Comments on: SharePoint SPListItem quirks

By: Michael Baltaks

Michael Baltaks — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:14:15 +0000

I could have done with some of this kind of information when I was putting together http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/splistcp – there’s a lot of this sort of issue, and AddFieldAsXml is a serious pain.

By: Roy

Roy — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:10:50 +0000

Hi there guys,

Awful quircks :p.
Anyhow, i’ve been trying some things out in sharepoint, specifically, making features multilingual, and well, I came to the conclusion where i had to change all my sourcecode (especially the ItemEventReceivers we coded). So first I had to read those lines of code, then had to conclude that I probably had to change everything.

I believe it’s as follows
SPListItem l_objItem = …;

l_objItem["InternalName"] should return the value of that particular field
l_objItem.Fields["DisplayName"] does the exact same thing.
So you should probably have done

SPListItem.Fields["Category"].

Could anyone confirm this?

By: Tuan Anh

Tuan Anh — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:58:11 +0000

thanhk for this.

By: Erik Burger

Erik Burger — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:29:15 +0000

Got to love those “quirks” eh? Excellent post, really useful.

Does anyone have any deas on how we can prevent ourselves and our fellow devs from running into this problem? Use the InternalName attribute? I doubt that would make a difference but maybe I’m missing something. Use an extension method? And how would it look?

It would be interesting to know why MS doesn’t provide a way to get a Field by its InternalName. I’ve run into a major problem using an MS template that references a Field by its DisplayName (details here: http://www.reversealchemy.net/2008/09/10/sharepoint-custom-templates-and-language-packs/). Why not use the InternalName? Wouldn’t that make life easier?

Or am I *really* missing something?

Cheers,
Erik

By: kipper stiever

kipper stiever — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:35:09 +0000

dude, what a PIA! i just ran into the same issue. thanks for the post, this would have taken me 3 days to figure out as well, no doubt.

By: Joel Corra

Joel Corra — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:06:33 +0000

You could probably turn this into a whole site dedicated to SharePoint quirks. For instance, one I came across recently is that if you update an SPListItem through the object model, and it has a Notes/Comments field with versioning enabled (one of the default fields on a Contact list), it blanks out the Notes field–if you check the version history, it actually shows Notes being set with a blank value. The original notes then no longer show in any Data Sheet view. However, that doesn’t happen if you update the item through the regular SharePoint interface.

Bil Simser has also documented at least 2 “quirks” with the AddFieldAsXml method of the SPList:

AddFieldAsXml cannot be used to set the InternalName correctly
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2005/07/21/420147.aspx
SharePoint basically ignores the InternalName property in the XML definition and uses the DisplayName for the both the internal name and display name.

AddFieldAsXml… I wish this monkey would go away
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2005/07/27/420766.aspx
The properties of the node in the XML definition have to be in a certain order, or it throws an error.

By: sudhakar

sudhakar — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:07:38 +0000

really helped me, good job, thanks

By: Online Collaboration + .Net + SharePoint = My Techie Life Adding item to sharepoint 2003 SPList Programmatically «

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:29:19 +0000

[...] Please visit the original article: http://blog.buro9.com/2007/02/26/sharepoint-splistitem-quirks for more infomation… Posted in SharePoint, .Net. [...]

By: Eddy

Eddy — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 09:08:56 +0000

Thanks for this.
It is a disgrace that it is not documented in MSDN.

By: daz

daz — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:54:52 +0000

it helped a lot!
si’ si’ …