SharePoint Data Zoom: Handling Complex List Field Types

The free SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part gives you the power and flexibility of creating SharePoint apps from .NET code, but with a much quicker result and without the hassles of coding, compiling and deploying your solution.
As a case and point, let’s take a look at the $SPFields context item. We’ve added $SPFields to provide better support for “hard to access” SharePoint list fields like Look-up, User, URL, Multi-Column, Multi-Choice and Rating Scale fields. To illustrate, let’s look at an example:

 1## Get the list
 2#set( $myLinksList = $web.lists.get_item("DOT Links") )
 3
 4#foreach($myLink in $myLinksList.Items)
 5
 6 ## Get hard to read SharePoint fields
 7 #set( $urlValue = $SPFields.GetUrlValue($myLink.get_item("URL")) )
 8 #set( $stateValue = $SPFields.GetLookupValue($myLink.get_item("State")) )
 9 #set( $ownerValue = $SPFields.GetUserValue($web, $myLink.get_item("Owner")) )
10
11 #beforeall
12   <table class="ms-listviewtable" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
13     <tr class="ms-viewheadertr">
14       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">Title</th>
15       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">State</th>
16       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">Owner</th>
17     </tr>
18 #odd
19     <tr class="">
20 #even
21     <tr class="ms-alternating">
22 #each
23       <td class="ms-vb2"><a href="$urlValue.URL">$urlValue.Description</a></td>
24       <td class="ms-vb2">$stateValue.LookupValue</td>
25       <td class="ms-vb2">$ownerValue.LookupValue</td>
26 #after
27     </tr>
28 #afterall
29   </table>
30 #nodata
31   No links found
32#end

In line 2 two of the example above, we load a variable $myLinksList with the “Dot Links” list. In line 4, we begin a for..each loop to iterate over each item in the list. On line 7 though 9, you’ll notice that we’re using the $SPFields context object to set the variables for three complex fields. $SPFields.GetUrlValue will handle parsing the URL type fields, while $SPfields.GetLookupValue can hand fetching the value of a lookup field from another list! Finally, $SPFields.GetUserValue handles parsing a User type field for you.
If you drop your attention down to lines 23 through 25, you’ll see where the convenience of the $SPFields context item really shines. For the URL field, we simply need to call $urlValue.URL and $urlValue.Description to get at our data. With the lookup and user field types, calling $stateValue.LookupValue and $ownerValue.LookupValue does the trick.
Here’s a screen shot of the simple output:


Convenient and flexible yet powerful! Don’t you agree?