Five years after the first release, the HTML Calculated Column remains the most popular topic on this blog.

The original page has been visited more than 200,000 times. It is definitely outdated, and in recent years I have pushed several new variations of this technique. The most popular is the color coding solution posted in the SharePoint User Toolkit, backed by this tutorial.

The most frequent issue reported by users has been the upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. This is actually all taken care of in the above links… but you need to read the fine print.

I plan to rewrite the instructions, especially as in the meantime Microsoft has pushed another version of SharePoint, and the SP 2010 update… doesn’t work with SP 2013! Well, there’s actually a simple fix for SP 2013, and “Panoone” posted it as a comment a couple days ago (@Panoone: thanks again! And let’s get in touch to discuss this further).

But that’s not all. SP 2013 brings a bunch of new client side technologies, and one of them works very well in our case: Client-Side Rendering.

What is Client-Side Rendering?

You can use Client-Side Rendering (CSR) in SharePoint to manipulate the rendering process of list views. Does this sound familiar? That’s exactly what my HTML Calculated Column has been doing for years! Except that now it is an official component integrated with list views. When you edit a Web Part, the very last option is the JS Link placeholder (see screenshot).

It will certainly take several weeks before I find time to update the SharePoint User Toolkit, so for those of you who are already familiar with both CSR and the HTML Calculated Column, let me share the code for SP 2013.

In the code, Calculated is the name of the calculated column.

var ccContext = {
  Templates: {
    Fields: {
      "Calculated": {"View": "<#=STSHtmlDecode(ctx.CurrentItem.Calculated)#>"}
    }
  }
};
SPClientTemplates.TemplateManager.RegisterTemplateOverrides(ccContext);

So easy, just 200 characters! STSHtmlDecode() is a JavaScript function provided by SharePoint that allows the conversion of the html string.

Of course, you could avoid using a calculated column, and build the html directly in the JS Link file. But then each rendering would require a different file. The beauty of the HTML Calculated Column is that one single JS Link file can support all the views in your site.

A warning!

Some time ago, I wrote about security risks when you use the HTML Calculated Column. As far as I can tell, the same warning applies to Client-Side Rendering. Handle with care!

CSR references

When Microsoft released SharePoint 2013, the documentation on Client-Side Rendering was quite poor. Fortunately SharePoint bloggers stepped in and you can find some nice posts to get familiar with CSR. Wes Preston’s blog is an excellent start.

So is the old way dead in SharePoint 2013?

Not quite yet! Not every view accepts Client-Side Rendering, and for example you’ll still find my tutorial helpful for calendar views.