Differences with SharePoint View Styles

I was putting together a sampling of views to demonstrate the various view styles in SharePoint and came across a bit of a bug (well, an annoyance really). First just a quick rundown of the various styles you can apply in a view:

View Style is the style you set by selecting it from a list when you create or edit a view. There are 7 styles to choose from, all with different twists to how they present your list or document library. The nice thing is you can get some variations on presenting things to the user without having to resort to a DVWP. Okay, I'll admit there's not a lot of styles out-of-the-box nor are they fabulous in any way. A little variety but definately not a replacement for a custom FrontPage job.

So, without further adieu, here they are:

Basic Table
The Basic Table is pretty much like the Default style. See below for details on what's different but pretty much it renders your view in the typical SharePoint view. Columns with clickable (sortable) headers, etc.

Document Details
The Document Details style is probably the most adventurous of the bunch and renders your items 2 across (no matter how wide the page is) with each item in a box. A link to the item itself and whatever columns you enable for the view along with an icon for the item and an icon for editing it.

Newsletter
I couldn't quite figure out the Newsletter style at first but the only difference I found from the Basic Table or Default style is that regular text fields were bold. I still don't know why they called it Newsletter?

Newsetter, no lines
Same as the Newsletter style but guess what, the lines between each row have been removed. Otherwise identical.

Shaded
Shaded is like the Default style but every other row is shaded using the colour of the site, alternating between dark and light. Typical ledger type display and helps break up the monotony when you have a lot of items.

Custom
The Custom style is set when you change any of the other styles like doing grouping, totaling or even adding columns. I guess it's there to just indicate that it's not stock.

Default
The default is well, the default. When you create a new document library or list you get a view called All Documents (or All Items for lists). This view uses the default style.

Now when you actually build a view and apply the Basic Table style you'll notice something. It looks exactly the same. Well it is, almost. The two are the same (ignoring the Guids for the views when compared side-by-side) however the Default style throws two copies of this snippet of code in:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT">
    On Error Resume Next
     Set NewDocumentButton = CreateObject("SharePoint.OpenDocuments.2")
     If (IsObject(NewDocumentButton)) Then
         fNewDoc2 = true
     Else
         Set NewDocumentButton = CreateObject("SharePoint.OpenDocuments.1")
     End If
    fNewDoc = IsObject(NewDocumentButton)
</SCRIPT>

This VBScript is for rendering the correct button on a toolbar. The Default style puts the code in twice but the Basic Table only puts it in once. No biggie and it's not needed so I would classify it as a bug, but maybe I'm just difficult that way.

Anyways, hope that explains some things about the views and what the differences (and similarities) are.

2 Comments

  • I understand that this is very old post. However, my page is getting JavaScript error "Object expected". Line number within this error points to this function within page source. Is there a way to get rid of Javascript error? Appreciate your help in this matter. Thanks,

  • Again, it's an old post, but just wanted to clarify that the newsletter view style (in SP2010 at least) is most beneficial when you want to show multiple lines of text. Any multiple-lines-of-text field will display beneath the other "header" fields which makes it look a bit newsletter-ish.

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