Harvey Balls Redux – Display Templates for Site Columns by Dave Paylor

It may surprise you to know that one of my most popular blog posts has nothing to do with SharePoint, knowledge management, performance improvement, jQuery, client side coding, SPServices, or anything else you might expect. It’s one I wrote years ago (June 17, 2009, to be exact) called Harvey Balls for Office Documents. I though it was a throwaway post at the time, but it’s number 11 on the hit parade.

Title Views
Adding Script into a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) in SharePoint 2010 32,547
Microsoft Excel Error: “There was a problem sending the command to the program.” 25,816
Adding jQuery+SPServices to a SharePoint Page: Step One, Always 23,973
Displaying Links Lists’ URLs in a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) in SharePoint 2010 22,971
Populating a SharePoint List Form with the Current User Information 20,789
Showing All Versions of “Append Changes to Existing Text” in a Data View Web Part (DVWP) 19,502
Using a DataSource in a Data View Web Part (DVWP) in a Different Site in SharePoint Designer 2010 18,904
The SharePoint 2010 “List View Lookup Threshold” and Why We Don’t Change It 18,848
Active Directory Groups vs. SharePoint Groups for User Management: A Dilemma 17,169
Working with SharePoint People Pickers with jQuery: A New Function Called findPeoplePicker 15,742
Harvey Balls for Office Documents 15,574

Harvey Balls are something that you probably have run across in one place or another. They can be used to give information about where something ranks or how far something has progressed at a glance. Consumer Reports magazine (and subsequently their Web site ConsumerReports.org) here in the US has used them for decades to rank products.

Here’s an undated example I found out on the Web:

Consumer Reports Harvey Balls

Dave Paylor (@DaveAtOBS) and I were talking at the Auckland airport after the New Zealand SharePoint Conference (an awesome conference – don’t miss it next year!) and somehow the topic of Harvey Balls came up.

Dave took our conversation as a challenge. He went home and came up with a Display Template for a SharePoint Site Column that will display that Site Column as Harvey Balls. Take a look at Dave’s post Display Templates for Site Columns – Harvey Balls.

This is an excellent example of the power of Display Templates. In the past, we would have had to deploy server-side code to create a new Field Type. I’ve seen very few people actually do that, probably because it was a relatively invasive project. Display Templates are something that can be added to a Site Collection by someone who knows JavaScript using SharePoint Designer. It’s not a non-developer task, but it’s doable by a lot of citizen developers out there.

Unfortunately, attaching the Display Template to a Site Column requires PowerShell. Dave’s added an item to the Office Development User Voice site called JSLink on Site Columns. I’ve voted for it, and if you’d like to create similar types of goodness in your SharePoint sites, you should vote for it, too. Microsoft is really watching the suggestions on that User Voice site and acting on them. If you have any other suggestions, please make them there!

Similar Posts

5 Comments

    1. It’s an excellent topic, Dave. Many people don’t realize how much they can do with Display Templates, as we discussed that day in Auckland.

      Are you aware of the SPCSR project on Github?

      #SPCSR is a Community driven SharePoint client script library born as a result of a tweeted picture from a Brussels train waiting room.

      M.

  1. It was great to meet you at the conference, Marc (I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that before).

    I was looking at display templates a few weeks ago for the project I’m working on and I couldn’t believe there was no GUI for site column templates. Does this mean that site column display templates are not supported on O365?

    It’s such a glaring omission that I gave 3 votes to the User Voice item.

Leave a Reply to Chris Brewer Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.