Using a list to replace text in a page

Question

I'll apologise in advance for what is probably a simple question but I'm struggling.

I'm putting together a project management site (which will become a template for other projects) and I would like to be able to replace text in certain pages with text from one of the defined lists to add some level of customisation.

I have a list for summary data (for example, the customer name) and I would like to define points in pages where the documents will update with the value from the customer name field when the project manager enters that information in the list. So initially the value in the list may be "enter customer name here" and would change to "customer name" when the project manager is assigned and updates this field.

I've had a search around and have found various posts about using the REST API to pull data from lists but I can't see how to get this working for my situation (another apology here, I have very limited experience with programming of any sort).

Any help much appreciated!

/Mark

Answer 1

You mentioned both "pages" and "documents". If you're trying to update Word documents with the customer name, that's OOB functionality via "quick parts", no coding required. If you're trying to update SharePoint pages, this is quite a bit trickier, and if you don't have a coding background I'd suggest modifying the requirements as to not pursue this. But if you have a classic site, you could put the text "enter company name" in a span with a class (in the HTML view), and then add a script editor part to the page to find and replace the text in the span with that class to the desired text. This would require the REST API, as mentioned, to pull the data, as well as the code to then update the page, perhaps using jquery.