Tag Archives: lists

Built-in Columns in JSON View Forms

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SharePoint Online supports custom list view formatting with a funky little JSON DSL that is meant to allow customization without giving users full control over HTML or Javascript which is unsafe. This feature was added back in 2017.

The way it works, only displayed columns are allowed to be referenced in the custom JSON. Unfortunately, the feature owners never got around with supporting the “hidden” or “default” SharePoint columns like Created By or Last Modified. As a result, there is no way to show these columns at all in the “modern UI”. (As of 2024, this is still the case and it boggles the mind).

At work we have these “hack day”-style events that we call FHL (Fix. Hack. Learn.) where we are given some time to work on knocking out some of the little problems that get in the way of work, annoy us, QOL improvements, etc. This bug was bothering me because we are using some SharePoint lists internally to track stuff and we often want to see who created an item in the list, but there was no way to show it without some crazy hacks. (Dear feature owners: using a workflow to copy a default field into a totally redundant one on the same item is not my idea of a workaround.)

Long story short, I added hacky support for some of the default columns so they can be used in custom JSON views. The following columns should be able to be referenced now in SharePoint Online.

  • $Author — The “Created by” user. This a user object, e.g. [$Author.title] or [$Author.email]
  • $Editor — The “Modified by” user.
  • $Created — The date the item was created.
  • $Modified — The date the item was last modified.
  • $ID — The list item id.
  • $_UIVersionString — The “pretty” string for the current item version.

Here’s the most basic demonstration of adding a custom footer to the list view form for a document.

{
    "elmType": "div",
    "style": {
        "display": "block"
    },
    "children": [
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$Author.title]"
        },
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$Created]"
        },
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$Editor.title]"
        },
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$Modified]"
        },
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$ID]"
        },
        {
            "elmType": "div",
            "txtContent": "[$_UIVersionString]"
        }
    ]
}

Here are a few posts from others online who have been struggling with this. Hopefully they run across this post and get unblocked.