Lists are fundamental to SharePoint. Views are fundamental to lists. It’s therefore important to understand exactly what’s going on when you set up a new view in a SharePoint list. The number of items to display, which columns to show and even the sort order are easily understood – however I’ve seen people become unglued when it comes to setting up the filters on the list (including me!). The other day I had a particularly strained query I needed to configure so I set about understanding exactly what goes on when you set up filters in a view. For some reason it’s not something I’d ever really dug into before, so it was a eureka moment when I realised that I could look at the CAML of a view after I had created it. [Obviously I knew that each view had CAML underpinning it – and I knew it was possible to get the schema for a list, including the views, through the UI – so why didn’t I do this years ago!?] So let’s walk through an example. First I’ll knock up a task list wi...
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