Tag Archives: Content Types

SharePoint – How to programmatically reorder a Content Type’s Fields/Site Columns

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First Post! :D

This Post will be showing you how you can reorder the order in which your Fields in the Content Type are displayed . This will effect the order in which they appear in the New, Edit and Display forms when the Content Type is applied to the List as well as in the Content Type Settings page:

New Item List Form

Personally I used the following code in a Feature Event Receiver because my Content Types were declaritively created in XML/CAML, but this code can also be used if and when the Content Types are created in code.

First of all we use a string array to specify the Field order that we want to achieve using the fields static names:

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string[] fieldOrder =
{
    "Title", "EventType",
    "TimeZone", "StartDate",
    "EndDate", "Location",
    "fAllDayEvent", "fRecurrence",
    "Duration", "EventCanceled",
    "Comments", "Category",
    "WorkspaceLink", "UID",
    "RecurrenceID", "Workspace",
    "RecurrenceData", "XMLTZone",
    "MasterSeriesItemID"
};

Then we get an instance of the Content Type from the SPWeb object of the site we want to apply the change to:

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SPContentType eventContentType = (((Your SPWeb Object))).ContentTypes["Event"];

Using the Reorder method of FieldLinks, we can pass in the string array we declared earlier:

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eventContentType.FieldLinks.Reorder(fieldOrder);

Then we use the Update method of the Content Type object, also passing in true which updates the inheriting Content Types as well (Not really required):

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eventContentType.Update(true);

And voilà! It’s Complete.

Complete Code Example:
Note: In the below example complete code it creates new SPSite and SPWeb objects but keep in my mind the way that you create/retrieve these objects will differ depending on where you are using the code and what is considered best practice.

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string[] fieldOrder =
{
    "Title", "EventType",
    "TimeZone", "StartDate",
    "EndDate", "Location",
    "fAllDayEvent", "fRecurrence",
    "Duration", "EventCanceled",
    "Comments", "Category",
    "WorkspaceLink", "UID",
    "RecurrenceID", "Workspace",
    "RecurrenceData", "XMLTZone",
    "MasterSeriesItemID"
};

using (SPSite oSPSite = new SPSite("http://examplesharepointsite.com"))
{
    using (SPWeb oSPWeb = oSPSite.OpenWeb())
    {
        SPContentType eventContentType = oSPWeb.ContentTypes["Event"];
        eventContentType.FieldLinks.Reorder(fieldOrder);
        eventContentType.Update(true);
    }
}

If you have any suggestions or notice anything that could be done better please tell me, as I am a junior SharePoint developer and infant blogger :P

Cheers,
Luke :D