Among the new features of SharePoint 2013 announced at the recent SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, we’re particularly excited about what’s new with List Views.
As any SharePoint 2010 developer knows, extending the List View web part can be a particularly daunting task. The XSLT code-behind is famously unintuitive, frequently mangled, and extremely unforgiving. Although credit should go to Microsoft for choosing a “platform agnostic” rendering language, the previously mentioned qualities result in more headaches to developers and higher implementation costs for businesses.
Thankfully in 2013, Microsoft has learned the error of its ways. In the upcoming version of SharePoint, the XSLT rendering language has been replaced with JavaScript-based Client Side Rendering (CSR). Most web developers are now glad to wave the XSLT language goodbye!
For a quick comparison, look at these two functionally equivalent code samples provided at the SharePoint Conference:
Obviously the CSR method is not only much shorter, it’s also far more intuitive to most web developers. The vast majority of web developers use JavaScript on a regular basis, but very few understand XSLT. Microsoft has wisely recognized this trend and catered to the developer masses as a result.