Two SharePoint posts in one day!
I only recently “got” content types in SharePoint. I’m not exactly sure why I had such a mental block about it but the penny finally dropped and I got quite excited about the possibilities (I’m such a geek)
So what I wanted to do was create some content types to use in calendars
In the previous version of SharePoint I had a company calendar that I used to track everything from meetings, to on-site support visits, to holidays and sick days
Once single form to try and figure all that out. Very ugly and difficult to use
For example, if your going to a client site, the customer name, a contact and a ticket reference are all pretty useful pieces of information. But if I’m just taking a couple of days off those fields become very pointless
Enter the content type!
I had the bright idea to create a content type for each of these “event types”
I pretty quickly ran into a problem. When creating a content type it has to be based on a parent type and the EVENT content type was no where to be seen.
So I had a poke through the help files and it mentioned that you could hide content types by adding them to the _HIDDEN group. That seemed oddly familiar so I went to an existing calendar, ensured content types were enabled and found the EVENT content type specified for the list
By drilling down onto the content type I was able to get the parent content type (also called event) and where it showed the group as _HIDDEN
After that it’s a two second job to put it in your own group
But that got me thinking
“It must be hidden for a reason”
After some quick searches I came up with two other posts
This one basically details the same steps I’ve outlined here
Working with SharePoint events lists
and this one talks about doing by getting in behind the scenes and changing the content type by hand in the ctypeswss.xml file
Calendar Content Types in SharePoint 2007 – Blog
Neither of them really go into any detail about if this will cause any problems or if it’s even a supported configuration
My only thinking is to do with how the calendar interacts with Outlook? and if you start making changes it could break it? Though I’m probably completely guessing on that to be honest
But I’ve done it and I now have this and everything seems ok so i’m happy for now!
Though I may need to change the title for the sick day content type 🙂
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