Thursday, April 07, 2011

Hide and auto-generate 'Title' column in SP Designer workflow

I have a custom list content type, which applicants use to apply for jobs. The default 'Title' column is not required as it would make no sense to the applicant. However, I don't want to rename the site column or delete it from the site because it is used in other lists.

The 'Title' column is inherited by lists and libraries from the 'Item' content type. If you don't require it you can specify it's settings to be hidden so that it does not appear in any forms.

To Hide the Title Column:

  1. Open your custom Content Type Information page and select the 'Title' column. 
  2. Set the Column Settings to 'Hidden'. 


To Auto-Generate the 'Title' column Value:

Using SP Designer you can auto-populate the 'Title' column based the values of other columns in your list item using the 'Update List Item' action:


NOTE: When a user creates a new list item the 'Title' will initially be set to '(no title)'.  Associated tasks in the workflow are related to the list item title by SharePoint (for example when collecting data from users). To avoid tasks being related to items with '(no title)' set a 'Pause for Duration' action for 5 minutes in the workflow to allow SP timer jobs to reflect your auto-generated title in the list.

1 comment:

  1. Is there a way to auto-gen a title without using SP designer?

    ReplyDelete