Unable to manage my custom Content Type column’s order and visibility (hidden, required or optional) inside a new Create form

Question

I have a team site collection and I want to add a new App of type Issue Tracking list. so I did the following:-

1. From the site collection I created a new App of type issue tracking.

2. Then from the site collection I created a new Content type named “CustomIssue” which has its parent as “Issue” content type.

3. I went to the Issue tracking list and I changed the default content type from Issue , to the new “CustomeIssue” content type.

4. I open the site collection using SP designer and I created a new Create form for my Issue tracking list based on the "CustomIssue" content type and I select to have the Create form as the default form when creating an item.

Everything till this point worked well. But when I open the “customIssue” content type , and I re-order the columns and I hide some columns, this was not reflected inside the custom Create form … although when using the default content type and the default create form you can control the order of the fields and to specify if certian fields hold be hidden from the content type itself.. so can anyone advice on this please?

Answer 1

The default forms are automatically recreated whenever you make changes to settings such as column order and visibility. But because a custom-created form can have additional elements besides the ones required for the content type's various columns, SharePoint does not attempt to apply those changes to your custom form.

For example, suppose you put some thick horizontal lines in your custom form, to separate some groups of closely-related fields from one another. If you changed the last column in group A to be hidden, and moved the last column in group B to the position after the column you just hid, SharePoint wouldn't know whether you'd want the moved column to be above or below the horizontal line separating groups A and B.

So a custom form will never be changed dynamically by SharePoint.

If your intent in creating the custom form was not to change the general appearance of the form, but merely to ensure that the field visibility and order you set for CustomIssue would be what is seen when a user creates a new item in the list, a custom form is actually not needed for this purpose. The default NewForm.aspx automatically decides what columns to display, and in what order, based on the settings you've configured for the content type. If your users use the basic "Add Item" button, NewForm.aspx will present the fields as configured for the list's default content type. If a user needs to create an item of a different content type, they can use the New dropdown in the ribbon and manually select a content type; NewForm.aspx will then display the fields appropriate for that content type instead.

Conversely, if you are using the custom form to accomplish specific visual or functional behaviors that NewForm.aspx does not offer, then you actually do not need to change the column order or visibility in the content type's settings at all; just change them in the custom form.