Beginning with this chapter, you will be performing hands-on work with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and its fundamental capabilities: the data management features. In Chapter 1 you learned that the main focus of SharePoint is to manage lists of items using a rich set of ancillary features. Now you will explore the different kinds of data and functionality that SharePoint offers as support for creating SharePoint solutions. Although this chapter concentrates on topics about standard features, future chapters, especially those in Part II and Part III will show you how to extend and customize the native environment. If you already know about SharePoint data management features and capabilities, you can probably skip this introductory chapter. If you want to learn more about lists, libraries, columns, content types, and so on, however, keep reading.
This section concentrates on general management tasks involved in managing lists and content. You need to have a new site collection to use as the target for the examples in this chapter. Every SharePoint farm installed with the Farm Configuration Wizard has a default web application that is published on the Internet Information Service (IIS) default site. This default web application also hosts the default site collection, meaning that you already have a target site to use to experiment with the procedures you will see in the following pages. If you prefer to make your own, however, Chapter 1 illustrates how to create a new site collection.
Depending on the site template you chose while provisioning your first site collection, you should have some more or less predefined list instances and content. Before creating a new list instance, however, you need to log on to the SharePoint site as a user with sufficient rights to create lists.
A SharePoint site has at least four levels of preconfigured rights. It categorizes its users into four groups:
Excel Services viewers Users who have View Only permission for the contents of the site.
Site visitors Users who can read the contents of the site.
Site members Users who can (by default) contribute to (add, update, delete) the contents of the site and items in the lists. Because they cannot change the overall structure of the site, however, they cannot create new list instances or change the definition of existing lists.
Site owners Users who have full control of both site content and structure, allowing them to change items, create new lists, or update the definition of existing lists.
Finally, as Chapter 1 showed, a fifth group, the site collection administrators group, is responsible for administering the entire site collection. Part VI contains an in-depth discussion of the security and permissions logic in SharePoint 2013, but for now, you simply need to understand that the permissions for the various user groups arise from the following permission levels:
View Only The user can view pages, list items, and documents. Document types with server-side file handlers can be viewed in the browser but not downloaded.
Limited Access The user can view specific lists, document libraries, list items, folders, or documents when given permissions. This permission cannot be assigned directly by an end user.
Read The user can view pages and list items, and download documents.
Contribute The user can view, add, update, and delete list items and documents.
Edit The user can add, edit, and delete lists. He or she can also view, add, update, and delete list items and documents.
Design The user can view, add, update, delete, approve, and customize.
Full Control The user has full control.
If you are logged in to the site as a user with sufficient rights, you can create new list instances and more, as you will learn in the following sections.
As discussed in Chapter 1, to create a new list, you first click the Settings control, which looks like a gear and is located in the upper-right corner of the SharePoint 2013 standard Team Site template. On the Settings menu, click Add An App, which will bring you to a page with the list of all the available content and apps available for creation. For example, to create a list of contacts, simply select the standard template for creating a contacts list, as shown in Figure 2-1.
The result will be the creation of a new list with a set of predefined columns (metadata) for each contact item.
After you have created a list instance, you can take advantage of the full set of features and capabilities that the SharePoint 2013 data foundation provides. The following are some of the main features and capabilities of a list instance:
Columns These allow you to define a set of custom columns describing the metadata of each item of the list.
Folders Like file system folders, list folders can be used to partition data in subfolders. Through folders, you can also define custom permissions and partition data visibility.
Content types These are models of data that can be used to store different kinds of items within a unique list instance. For example, you could have contacts of various types, such as customers, suppliers, employees, and so on. They could share some common columns, and have some specific columns, too. Chapter 3 will cover content types in detail.
Views Every list can render with various views. A view can be used to group items by a specific field value or content type, to filter and/or order items, to page the results, and so forth.
Permissions Each list can have its own set of permissions, which can be different from the default permissions applied to the site.
Versioning This allows the list to keep track of changes and versions of items.
Workflows These are business processes that execute when an item is created or modified.
Content approval This is a content approval engine that you can use to enrich content provisioning, such as adding approval rules and processes.
Alerts This is an alerting infrastructure that you can employ to alert people about new, updated, or deleted contents.
RSS feeds This provides the capability to subscribe to and monitor a feed from any kind of feed aggregator.
Offline capabilities This allows you to keep data offline by using tools such as Microsoft Outlook or SkyDrive Pro.
Office integration This provides the ability to integrate list contents with Microsoft Excel, Access, and other Office applications.
In fact, you can benefit from these features without having to write any code.
The richest edition of SharePoint 2013 offers nearly 30 list templates out of the box. Table 2-1 presents some of the more common list templates.
Table 2-1. Common list templates available in SharePoint
Template name | Description |
Announcements | A list for publishing news items and information. |
Asset Library | A list for sharing rich media assets, including images, audio, and video files. |
Calendar | A calendar that lets users schedule meetings and events, and set deadlines. You can synchronize a Calendar list with Microsoft Outlook. |
Contacts | A list of people, including their addresses. You can synchronize a Contacts list with Outlook. |
Custom List | A “blank” list model, meaning that you can create whatever type of list that you like by defining custom columns and views. |
Data Connection Library | A list for sharing connections to external data sources, such as databases, SOAP services, OLAP cubes, and so on. |
Document Library | A list for sharing documents and files. |
External List | A list that supports reading and managing data from external data sources via Business Connectivity Services. |
Form Library | A list for sharing XML-based business forms, such as those produced with Microsoft InfoPath. |
Links | A list that stores hyperlinks to sites and resources. |
Picture Library | A list for sharing pictures. This list type includes upload, preview, slideshow, and thumbnail functionalities. |
Slide Library | A list to share slideshows built with Microsoft PowerPoint. It includes slide management functionality. |
Survey | A list to create surveys, polls, or lists of questions. This type provides features for viewing a graphical summary of the responses. |
Tasks | A list of tasks to execute. It includes deadlines, notes, and completion status. |
As you can see, you can create a variety of lists. You can also customize any list so that it meets your specific needs.
If none of the predefined list templates suits your needs, you can create a custom list instance and define its columns and views manually. Of course, whenever you create any list, you can define custom views and columns, but when working with custom list instances, which are blank lists with the minimal set of fields required by SharePoint, you always need to customize the columns to add your own fields.
By default, a custom list has only five public and visible fields:
Title This is a mandatory field that defines a title for each item in the list. It is useful for rendering list items and for accessing the contextual menu that SharePoint provides for each individual item in a list.
Created This is an autocalculated field that stores information about when the user created the current item.
Modified This is an autocalculated field that stores information about when the last user modified the current item.
Created By This is an autocalculated field that stores information about the user who created the current item.
Modified By This is another autocalculated field that stores information about the user who last modified the current item.
The set of fields just described belongs to the base Item content type, from which every SharePoint list item inherits.
Imagine that you want to create a list of products. If you create a custom list for this purpose, you will need to add some custom columns. For example, you could have columns such as ProductID, Description, Price, and so on. Although SharePoint cannot be considered an alternative to a database, you can think of creating a custom list as similar to creating a custom table in your favorite RDBMS, for the sake of simplicity. After reading this book, you will understand the role of SharePoint in a real software solution, and you will learn when and how to use it for storing data, without using it as a database replacement.
To set up a custom list, create the list instance, and then browse to the List Settings page by clicking the List Settings command on the List ribbon tab, as shown in Figure 2-2.
The List Settings command takes you to the List Settings page, where you can configure the settings of the current list. From this page, for example, you can customize appearance information such as the title and description of the current list, enable and configure settings about versioning of items, define validation rules, manage workflows, configure advanced settings, and so forth. In particular, you can configure the following parameters on the Advanced Settings page:
Content Types Specifies whether to allow management of content types in the list. Think of content types as containers of metadata and other settings. You can use content types to define data-item template models. By default, a list hosts items with a specific content type that has a default set of fields, depending on the model of list you are configuring. For example, a Tasks list is made up of items of type Task, while a Calendar is made up of items of type Event, and so on. However, as you will see later in this chapter, you can define more specific content types to better define and manage the metadata. As an example, you can define such concepts as Customer, Employee, Order, and so on, each with its specific fields.
Item-Level Permissions Specifies the items that users are authorized to read, create, and edit. It is a setting specific for a list of items. It is not available in document libraries.
Attachments Specifies whether list items can have file attachments or not. It is another setting specific for a list of items. It is not available in document libraries.
Folders Defines whether the New Folder command is available on the ribbon.
Search Controls whether items in the list should appear in search results. Users who do not have permission to see the items of the list will not see them in search results, no matter what this setting is.
Reindex Instructs the search engine crawler to start a full reindexing of the current list’s content at the next scheduled crawl.
Offline Client Availability Specifies whether the items in the list can be downloaded to offline clients.
Datasheet Enables a datasheet view for bulk-editing data in the list.
Dialogs Controls whether the new, edit, and display forms of items are displayed in a dialog box or in place.
Just after the list of available configuration parameters and commands, you’ll see a list of Columns, where you can manage the columns of the current list (see Figure 2-3).
Also on the List Settings page, you can create new custom columns from scratch or add an existing site column (this will be discussed later in the chapter, in the “Site columns” section). In addition, you can alter the ordinal position of columns. This helps when you want to reorganize the positions of many columns. Finally, you can define custom indexes, which is useful whenever you need to search the contents of a list using indexed columns as the search criteria.
When you select Create Column, a specific SharePoint administrative page appears, requesting information about the type of column that you want to create. Figure 2-4 shows the Create Column page. Here, you can define the name of the new custom column and the field type, enter a brief description, and supply other validation rules and constraints. For example, you can define whether the new column is required or optional, whether it should have a default value, whether it should contain a value that is unique across the whole list instance, and so on.
As Figure 2-4 shows, you can choose from a variety of data types when creating a new column. The following are the available field types:
Single Line of Text This corresponds to a single line of text.
Multiple Lines of Text This corresponds to a text area with multiple columns and rows.
Choice (Menu to Choose From) This has a predefined set of values. You can configure it to accept single or multiple values, and whether it should render as a drop-down menu, a radio button list, or a list of check boxes.
Number (1, 1.0, 100) This defines a numeric column that can have decimals and minimum and maximum value.
Currency ($, ¥, €) This corresponds to a money field, which behaves almost like a Number field type. You can select the currency format that you prefer.
Date and Time This defines a Date and Time field that you can configure to handle date-only fields or date and time fields.
Lookup (Information Already on This Site) This retrieves its values from another list within the same site.
Yes/No (Check Box) This defines a Boolean column.
Person or Group This is a particular type of lookup field that searches for a user or group defined in the current site.
Hyperlink or Picture This column type holds an external URL, which can be either a page URL or an image URL. In the latter case, you can configure this field type to render the image available at that URL.
Calculated (Calculation Based on Other Columns) This defines a formula that can be calculated based on other fields defined in the current list, and then it renders the result.
Task Outcome This is a field type representing the result of a task typically related to a running workflow process or business process.
External Data This is a specific field type that looks up values via Business Connectivity Services. You will find more about this topic in Chapter 16
Managed Metadata This field is related to the Managed Metadata service.
If these options do not meet your needs, you can define custom field types of your own using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and some custom code, installing them onto the target SharePoint server farm. You’re better off, however, avoiding such extensions and customization techniques. In fact, although a custom field type definition is absolutely possible and supported, it requires deploying code, XML files, and configurations on the physical file systems of the servers in the farm. Due to the invasiveness of this approach, it is a scenario that is not supported in the standard offering of Office 365. It would require you to upgrade to a dedicated farm either on-premises, or on Office 365 Dedicated.
On the contrary, if you would like to extend the available types of data, you can take advantage of the new SharePoint 2013 client-side rendering (CSR) engine. Through this new feature, you can declare custom behavior for predefined field data types by simply providing some custom JavaScript code that will be executed on the client side.
New to SharePoint 2013 is the ability to add fields and change the shape of a list or library directly from the current view of the list, just as if you were in an Excel spreadsheet. Notice the New Item and Edit This List commands at the top of the list view. Click New Item to add a new item to the list via a dedicated webpage. If you click the Edit This List command, you will switch the view to the editable and configurable grid shown in Figure 2-5. Based on some client-side HTML and JavaScript code, this grid view behaves almost like an Excel spreadsheet.
To edit the grid, click the + (plus) icon above the rightmost column. You can add new columns on the fly, choosing a proper data type and a name for the target field, as well as edit existing items and add new ones. To stop the editing session, simply click the Stop link or change to a different page.
This technique is powerful because the end user can design the shape of the data without technical skills. Nevertheless, the resulting fields and data structure will be poor from a design, planning, and taxonomy perspective. Moreover, the names of the fields created using this technique will be strange because they are a kind of hash code of four characters based on the description provided by the end user for the dynamically created field. Thus, rather than relying on these tools and facilities, the better approach for developing and designing solutions is to plan, design, and deploy fields as site columns within content types.
In addition to lists and columns, you can create one or more custom views for a list. In fact, every list has at least one default view that renders the fields of each item, using predefined ordering and filtering criteria. Any user with the proper permissions can create personal views of a list, and those with sufficient permissions can create a new, shared view for the target list. For example, imagine that the Products list discussed in the preceding section is ready to use, containing custom fields such as ProductID, Description, and Price. Figure 2-6 shows the default view for this list.
You can use the Modify View command (highlighted on the ribbon in Figure 2-6) to change the current view. Alternatively, by clicking the Create View command (also visible in Figure 2-6), you can create a completely new view. If you choose to create a new view, you can select one of the five predefined view formats:
Standard View This is the classic view style. You can select fields, sorting and filtering rules, grouping, paging, and so on. The result will be a webpage.
Calendar View This view shows data in a calendar format (daily, weekly, or monthly). You would likely use this only when you have data related to dates.
Datasheet View This view renders data in an editable spreadsheet format (such as Excel), which is convenient for bulk editing.
Gantt View This option creates a view that renders data in a Gantt chart. It is primarily useful when rendering the tasks of a project.
Custom View in SharePoint Designer This option launches Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2013, in which you can design a new view.
More Info
SharePoint Designer 2013 can be downloaded for free at http://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=35491.
For the sake of simplicity, select a Standard View template. You will be prompted with a configuration page, on which you will define the rendering criteria for the new view, as shown in Figure 2-7.
You have the opportunity to configure many aspects of the view with the settings on the Create View page:
Columns Select the columns to render in the view and their ordinal position in the display.
Sort Define up to two columns for use when sorting data.
Filter Filter the output items. It is suggested to use indexed columns for better performances in filtering.
Tabular View Specify whether a multiple-selection check box should be rendered adjacent to each row.
Group By Define up to two columns to use for grouping data.
Totals Establish total rows selectively on each visible column.
Style Select a graphical rendering style for the list view.
Folders Select whether to view items by browsing through folders, or all at once with a folder flat view.
Item Limit Define a limit to the amount of data to return. This is useful when working with very large lists.
Mobile Configure settings to better render the view on a mobile device.
In the example list of Products, you could plan to order products based on their price, listed from least to most expensive. Figure 2-8 shows the custom view output. Custom views are useful for browsing and managing data stored in large custom lists of items, but they are not a security measure by any means. In fact, content is still visible to anyone who has at least read access to the source list, even if you hide a column from a view.
A document library is a particular kind of list that is designed to host files (for instance, documents) instead of generic items. Each file corresponds to a single list item, which can also have a rich set of metadata fields to make it more meaningful. To create a document library, simply select the Document Library list template on the Add an App page, shown in Figure 2-1.
Suppose that you want to create a list of offers, which includes some custom metadata for each offer file, such as Protocol Number, Target Customer, and Offer Date Time. Begin by clicking the Settings menu, and then click the Add An App command to create the library. Lastly, select the Document Library app template.
When adding a new document library, you can choose to provide some advanced information, like a description, whether the contents of the library will be versioned using the SharePoint version control system, and a document template that can define the default template to use when creating new documents in the library.
After you create the library, you can access it through a UI that is basically the same as the one you used to manage lists of simple items. A document library, however, has some additional features and commands. For example, the Files ribbon tab (which replaces the Items tab) contains commands specifically tailored for managing files and documents. Instead of a List tab to manage the list, here you have the Library ribbon tab, shown in Figure 2-9.
The following are some of the most important commands available on the Files tab:
New Document Creates a new document, starting from a document template.
Upload Document Uploads a single document or a set of documents.
New Folder Creates a new folder for organizing and navigating documents.
Edit Document Opens a selected document using its corresponding editing program. For example, if you have selected a DOCX file, this command opens the file in Microsoft Word.
Check Out Locks others out of the document so that you can have exclusive access to the file in read and write mode.
Check In Releases the exclusive lock on the file, confirming any changes and creating a new version of the file (if file versioning is enabled).
Discard Check Out Releases the exclusive lock on the file, discarding any changes.
View Properties Shows the metadata properties of a selected file.
Edit Properties Edits the metadata properties of a selected file.
Shared With Shows the people with which you shared the current document.
Share Allows you to share the current document with other people.
Delete Document Deletes one or more selected files.
Download a Copy Downloads a copy of a selected file.
Send To Sends the selected file to a specific destination.
When working with a document library, you can configure settings and create custom columns and custom views, just as you can with a standard list. Plus, in a document library, you can configure a document template for creating any new documents. To configure this feature, select the Library Settings command on the Library ribbon tab. The Document Library Settings page appears. Select the Advanced Settings menu item to open a page on which you can configure a number of interesting parameters (see Figure 2-10). Some of these parameters are the same as the common lists; others are specific for document libraries. The following are the specific advanced settings for document libraries:
Document Template This allows you to specify the relative URL of a document that will be used as the template for all new files created in the document library.
Opening Documents in the Browser Here, you can define how SharePoint behaves when opening browser-enabled documents—that is, documents that can be opened within the browser. You can choose between Open In The Client Application, to open the file on the client side, within the specific client application; Open In The Browser, to open the file in the browser; and Use The Server Default, which is set by the farm administrators.
Custom Send to Destination Use this to add a custom target to the Send To menu.
Search This allows you to choose whether or not the contents of the current library will be available as results of queries to the search engine.
Site Assets Library This determines if this library will be the default assets library for storing images, videos, and other files when users upload contents to their blogs or wiki pages.
In the previous sections, you defined custom lists and columns by simply configuring them at the list level. In some situations, however, you need to define the same column type in multiple list instances. Wouldn’t it be great to define the concept once, and then use it in many libraries? SharePoint site columns make sharing a metadata definition across multiple lists and libraries easy. A site column is the formal definition of a field type (a metadata type) shared at the website level. Site column definitions are hierarchical. In fact, you can define a site column in the root site of a site collection and use it in all the sites of the collection. Having a unique concept for describing metadata simplifies defining search queries and improves the quality of search results. For example, suppose you use a site column to define a protocol number that is shared across many document libraries. You could then define a query to retrieve all documents that have a protocol number field containing a value within a specified range, regardless of the library in which they are stored. A list of similar examples could be very long.
To define a new site column, browse to the Site Settings page through the Settings menu (see Figure 2-11). Under the Web Designer Galleries group, you will find a menu item named Site Columns, which brings you to the page on which you manage existing site columns or create new ones.
The Site Columns page lists all the existing site columns, divided into groups. To create a new site column definition, simply click the Create button at the top of the page. Doing so takes you to the Site Column Definition page for site columns, which is similar to the page you used to create a list-level column (Figure 2-4). Here you can specify the settings that control the grouping of columns, making it easier to retrieve them on the Gallery page.
After you define a site column, you can reference it in any list or library by selecting the Add From Existing Site Columns command (Figure 2-3) on the List Settings page. You can also use a site column to define a custom content type, as you will see in the next section.
A content type is a formal definition of a data template or item template, a model of the data you intend to store in a particular list or document. Each time you create a new item in a list or a new document in a library, you are creating an instance of a content type. In addition, every list and library has one default content type under its cover. For example, if you create a list of type Contacts, and you add a new item, this item will be made of a set of columns that are defined in the Contact content type, which is a default content type provided by SharePoint. If you create a list of type document library, as you did in the previous section, by default, the library will host items with a content type of Document.
A content type is based on a set of site column references, together with some other optional information related to forms, rendering templates, a specific document template (for document items only), and custom XML configuration.
As you will see in more detail in Chapter 3, content types are hierarchical and exploit an inheritance pattern. At the root, there is a System content type, which is essentially a low-level base class for every other content type. Figure 2-12 depicts the hierarchical inheritance tree for native content types. As you can, see the System content type is inherited by the Item content type, which acts as the base class, either directly or indirectly, for every other content type. For example, the Contact content type you used in the list of contacts inherits from Item, as does the Document content type. The Picture content type, which is the default content type for a picture library, inherits from the Document content type.
Depending on the edition of SharePoint you are using and on the configuration of your farm, content types can also be shared across multiple site collections, web applications, or farms via the Content Type Hub service, which is available through the Managed Metadata service and part of the SharePoint Server 2013 Standard edition.
You can manage existing content types or define custom content types by clicking the Site Content Types command found under the Web Designer Galleries group of the Site Settings page. To create a new content type, click the Create button at the top of the page. A new page appears, asking you to supply a few settings, such as the name, description, logical group, and the parent content type of your new content type. Immediately after creating the new content type, you will be redirected to the page for content type management, shown in Figure 2-13. Here, you can configure all the content type settings, including general information about the content type, specifying a custom document template (in the event of a content type inheriting from Document), managing workflows, information management policies, and many other options. You can also configure a content type that uses a specific set of site columns. Doing this lets you share the same field types across multiple content types.
After defining one or more custom content types, you can map them to lists or libraries using the list or library Advanced Settings page. Thus, the following is the process to design content in a SharePoint site:
Define the site columns.
Create the content types that will use those columns.
Create the lists or libraries that use the content types.
By working in this sequence, you will end up with a common set of data items (content types) that share a common set of data fields (site columns), stored in custom data repositories (lists and libraries). Be careful that you should never change or edit the out-of-the-box content types. In case of need, you should create custom content types, inheriting from ones that already exist, and customize them.
Sites are another kind of data repository that you can define. Generally, you can use a site as a place to hold collections of lists and libraries that are shared by the same target audience or that share the same functional meaning. For example, you could have a website for each department of your company (Sales, Human Resources, Information Technology, and so on). Sites are stored in site collections, so before you can create a new site, you first need to have a site collection.
As you may remember, each site collection contains one root site, by default. To create another site, invoke the New Subsite command on the Site Contents page. To access the Site Contents page, you can click the Settings menu, represented by a gear in the top-right corner of the webpage area, and then click the Site Contents menu item. You will be prompted to select from a wide list of site templates; the following are some of the most interesting choices:
Team Site A site for a team of people who want to share documents, a calendar, announcements, and tasks.
Blank Site A blank site ready for customization.
Blog A site for managing a blog, which can accept comments, ratings, and so forth.
Project Site A site for managing and collaborating on a project.
Community Site A place where community members discuss topics of common interest.
Visio Process Repository A site for teams to quickly view, share, and store Visio process diagrams.
Document Center A site to centrally manage documents in an enterprise-level company.
Records Center A site to manage records of documents in an enterprise-level company. It provides configurable routing tables to direct files to specific locations based on custom company rules.
Business Intelligence Center A site for presenting business intelligence content in SharePoint.
Enterprise Search Center A site that supports searching for documents or people in an enterprise-level company.
Basic Search Center A site that delivers a basic search experience.
Although these are the most common website templates, you might see others, depending on which SharePoint edition you have installed.
This chapter discussed the fundamental parts of SharePoint data. You saw how to create lists of items, site columns, content types, and sites. By capitalizing on the information discussed in this chapter, you will be able to create simple data management solutions using SharePoint 2013 as your data repository. However, as you further read this book, you will see why you should not use SharePoint as an RDBMS surrogate; instead, SharePoint is an appropriate companion for a relational database. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to provision data structures using code and markup, rather than simply designing them through the web browser interface as you did in this chapter.