Here are some more SharePoint hacks (continuing on from my last post here)

First off some hacks for the SPGridView which is actually a pretty useful control, but fails to do a few things, like displaying attachment columns as-per SharePoint's default List views (with a little paper-clip symbol), and the second (and much more annoying) it doesn't use the current users regional settings / timezone for formatting DateTime values.

The hacks:

• Attachments bound field
• Localized DateFime bound field

And finally support for a ListForm replacement web part - after trying to customize the ListForm to suit a customers requirements by creating a CustomListForm in SharePoint designer I gave up in disgust because it's just too limited in what it lets you achieve, and worst of all, it breaks attachments support!  So I wrote a small web part to replace it, which allows for fine-grained control of visibility and editability (if that's even a word) of each field, and as an added bonus it doesn't break the attachments functionality.  I also wanted to add additional links/buttons to the form which triggered a save including validation etc. - so I did a little hack to implement that as well.

• Web part to replace New or Edit ListForm
• Adding links to the Edit Form web part
  

I might have a few more to post before the end of the project - but it's almost wrapped up, so these may be the last for a while.

Hopefully someone out there finds them useful.

I've been working with SharePoint lately, it's a technology of highs and lows... the highs are when you've finally got something to work that should've worked in the first place, the lows are well... all the times in between.

Ok, so that sounds cynical - SharePoint is actually quite a cool product - there's a lot of good in there... stuff that would take you a while to write yourself... but it just tends to drive you a bit crazy, things that look easy from a distance become hard to achieve because of poor documentation, lack of extension points and the difficulty in building testable code.

At any rate, while on this project I've been compiling a list of hacks that other people may find useful, which I used to solve a few of the problems I was hitting while developing... here are the first few:

• Altering the default hour of DateTime fields in a ListForm.
• Defaulting one date field to another in a ListForm.
  
• Determining if a SPListItem is dirty.

There are some more coming shortly.