How to quickly get the EditForm look and feel and functionality and customize it?

Question

I have developed a custom ASPX page (a SharePoint application page) which is used as a replacement for the default EditForm. I need to have some fields available for editing (so, not all as the default one is providing) and I need additional functionality to happen once the user clicks the Save button on the form.

Miming the functionality from the EditForm for the fields has proven to be quite a lot of work. I have two multi-choice people and group fields and one managed metadata field.

Is there a way to quickly, or more efficiently, generate the standard behavior for those fields and to append additional functionality to the Save action? Thanks.

Answer 1

You should better create a web part instead of a application page. This web part can be placed directly on the edit form instead of the default edit form. You can then react on all the standard events that will be fired by the ribbon. The ribbon will be also generated by SharePoint.

In a application page you need to create your own custom ribbon for the form.