Custom SharePoint Site Definition with Discussion list view

Article
09/02/2010

I have been trying to develop a new custom SharePoint site definition on SharePoint 2007 that would put a discussion list view web part on the home page of the created site.

Now everything seemed to be working fine and list view was added to the home page but when you try to click on any discussion link you would be redirected to the Default.aspx page (same page) and the all discussion items would disappear from the list view I have been searching for like two days and investigating this issue. So let me revise with you what I did first.

As usual I created the folder with the ONET.XML file. In this file I added the lists I needed and one of them was the discussions list as below:

Then I added the view I needed to the “DEFAULT.ASPX” file as below:

Nothing strange right simple and straight forward stuff. Now when I created a new site using this site definition it created the list successfully and the view web part is added to the DEFAULT.ASPX page. So far so good. I added several discussions to the discussions list and they are visible on the list view web part. BUT when you click any item it directs you to the same DEFAULT.ASPX page but now the discussions list view does not show any items. I started to investigate more and the strangest thing is that when you hover over the items link in the web part it shows that it will try to open the item using the DEFAULT.ASPX page, while if you add a new discussion list view web part it is pointing to FLAT.ASPX page and of course this works.

After many trials and frustrations I found the fairly simple solution. You need just to change the view line in the ONET.XML file to be as follows.

It seems that there is an issue with how discussions list was built and that the discussion is a custom content type so you need to specify that in the view and all was working fine

Custom SharePoint Site Definition with Discussion list view

Additional resources