SharePoint 101 E. Server side dev ~ Lists & Event Receivers

Lists and document libraries are used to store SharePoint content. You can register event receivers to react dynamically to changes in list items.

##List Instances

• Provisionning list instances through XML
• Provisionning list instances programmatically
  • This has the benefit of giving you the code hook to manually patch up a list when you want to make it evolve
• Field definitions are copied when a list is created
  • List columns are independent from Site columns
  • This lets you re-use columns across a site collection, while at the same time giving them a slightly different behavior on each specific list where they are instantiated
  • This is painful when you update a site column definition, because you need to manually look through every list that uses this field and patch their corresponding list column
• Localization warning: Lists are accessed programmatically through their Display Name or URL, which will vary depending on the language of your site

##List Templates

• Designing List Templates in Visual Studio
• Field definitions are repeated in the list definition's schema.xml
  • A common source of errors
• Why to avoid list definitions when you only need a single list instance
  • Hint: as with all XML templates, once you instantiate a list, all subsequent template updated won`t propagate automatically to the existing list instances; you will need to patch all your list instances by hand, i.e. programmatically.

References:

• Microsoft Press Store - Microsoft® SharePoint® 2013 Developer Reference: Data Provisioning - List Definitions

##List Event Receivers

• Synchronous vs. Asynchronous events
• Before (-ing) events vs After (-ed) events
• Example: Adding an event receiver to a list
• Event sequence numbers

References:

• Using Event Receivers in SharePoint Foundation 2010
  • Part 1 of 2: Theory
  • Part 2 of 2: Examples