Sharepoint 2010 custom calendar display form Date formatting not displaying on site

Question

I have been tasked with setting up a calendar on SharePoint 2010 Foundation to record bookings.

I would like to use a custom display form so I can remove and/or reorder the fields. I created a new display form using SharePoint Designer 2010 (Navigated to subsite > Lists and Libraries > myList and clicked New... under Forms section, and chose Display type).

Using the new Display form I have noticed a few bugs/inconsistencies.

First, lookup fields revert to showing raw HTML, rather than a link. I fixed that by adding

disable-output-escaping="yes"

to the xsl tag attributes.

Second, dates seem to show as a full ISO date, rather than a more readable dd/MM/yyyy HH:MM format. I thought I could solve this by adding the code below

<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDate(string(@EventDate),2015,5)"/>

In the design view in SharePoint Designer, the desired formatting shows up. However, when I view an item on the site itself (through IE) the field is blank. I cannot work out why Designer shows the correct result, but the site itself does not. I can't even find anyone else online with the same issue. Hence this post.

This image shows the SharePoint Designer 2010 Design view. The Start Time has been formatted using the formula above and displays correctly. The End Time is the default ISO format.

Viewing an event using the custom display form via the site is shown in this image. The formatted date is not displayed at all.

Is there a way of getting the site to properly display the date with the formatting formula applied? Better still, is there a way of customising the display form without these annoying quirks? (Boolean fields showing as 1/0 rather than Yes/No. Recurrence field showing 1/0 rather than the actual recurrence schedule etc).

Answer 1

Recurrence field showing 1/0 rather than the actual recurrence schedule

I've learned that you can show @RecurrenceData rather than @fRecurrence, which outputs something like this:

<recurrence><rule><firstDayOfWeek>su</firstDayOfWeek><repeat><daily dayFrequency="1" /></repeat><windowEnd>2013-03-12T20:00:00Z</windowEnd></rule></recurrence>

rather than a zero. It's still not great, but at least you can kind of figure out the recurrence schedule from that output. Maybe if you know how to convert an xsl output into html, you could share with me?

I'm working on creating a display page for calendar items that is more print-friendly than the default.

Thanks!

Answer 2

Peter,

When you add a custom display form it doesn't works as OOB Display Form...

This image shows the SharePoint Designer 2010 Design view. The Start Time has been formatted using the formula above and displays correctly. The End Time is the default ISO format.

This is happening because by default your custom display web part will be taking the first event in the Calendar list, you will need to add a Parameter to your display form and take the EventId/ListItemId from Query String.. Then filter the display form with this Query String Variable on ID field..

Optionally, limit the display form to show 1 Item, this can be done by clicking Ribbon -> Data View Tools -> Options -> Paging -> Limit to 1 Item

(Boolean fields showing as 1/0 rather than Yes/No.

You can apply some xsl to fix this, something like:

<xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="@BooleanFieldName='1' or msxsl:string-compare(string(@BooleanFieldName),'Yes','','i')=0 or msxsl:string-compare(string(@BooleanFieldName),'True','','i')=0">Yes</xsl:when>
     <xsl:otherwise>No</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Recurrence field showing 1/0 rather than the actual recurrence schedule

Don't know about this one, I guess you need to add a List View to show all the recurrent Events...!

I hope this helps