Target Audiences in SharePoint list

Question

I have a list where I need to add Audience targeting.

I have added the site column Target Audiences to the list.

However, when I add any SharePoint group to the audience of a list item, it shows up as ;;;;GroupName in the list view.

Why does the ;;;; come up in the list view? I tried it on another publishing site, and had the same behavior.

Answer 1

This is the internal representation, the three types of values are separeted by ;;:

AudienceIds(Guids);;DistributionListsNames;;SharePointGroups

So when you have ;;;;GroupName it is just showing that there is nothing from the other types.

You can check more about that here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/sharepoint-2010/ee906649(v%3Doffice.14)#target-a-web-part-to-a-specific-audience-programmatically

Relevant part:

You can assign three kinds of audiences to the AuthorizationFilter property. To target a Web Part to a global audience programmatically, you can retrieve the GUID for the audience you want by using a AudienceManager object and then assigning that GUID to the AuthorizationFilter property of the Web Part. You can also assign the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) distinguished name of a distribution list or the name value of a SharePoint group to this property.

The SharePoint Server 2010 framework requires that these three kinds of values be separated by a pair of semicolons (";;"). Multiple values for global audiences and SharePoint groups are delimited by commas, and multiple values for distribution lists are delimited by newline characters ("\n"). The following example builds a string that would be valid for assignment to the AuthorizationFilter property.

string[] audienceIDs = new string[] {"GUID", "GUID"};
string[] distributionLists = new string[] 
{"LDAP Distinguished Distribution List Name", "LDAP Distinguished Distribution List Name"};
string[] sharePointGroups = new string[] {"SharePoint Group Name", "SharePoint Group Name"};

string result = string.Format("{0};;{1};;{2}",
string.Join(",", audienceIDs),
string.Join("\n", distributionLists),
string.Join(",", sharePointGroups));