Discussion Board. A view with the “more” button functionality

Question

Is there a way to create a view in SharePoint for a Discussion Board that shows only a part of the body content and a link at the end that says "more". Then, when the user clicks on this link the complete content is shown. I'd like to do it with Out of the box functionality.

Answer 1

If you want to stay for the OOTB I would sugest 3 approaches:

1. Use jQuery libraries - you could easily depose those in any Document Library and reference them from Content Editor Web Part which you would depose on the page where you need to enable it.
2. Using SharePoint Designer, modify the OOTB web parts (mainly XSLT DataView)
3. I would say more advanced, without re-compiling code create a custom view in the list where you can embed your JS code.

Conclusion: I all cases you need considerable skills with XML/XSLT and some JavaScript.

Answer 2

The preferred way to accomplish this is with client side code, as the users don't want the page to refresh everytime they need to know more. You'll need to use JavaScript/jQuery, or css in modern browsers.

Here is an example of text truncation using jQuery:

http://sharepointjavascript.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/truncate-text-in-list-view-and-add-mouseover-preview/