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Hi,

 I am creating some custom site content types and am running into an issue:  I would like to replace the Title field in each site content type with something more specific like Customer Name, Company Name, etc...  I tried hiding the Title field and making my own custom field but when I add this content type to a list somewhere, I don't get the "(Linked to item with edit menu)" option for the list item in a view.

 Does anybody have any suggestions on how to not use the Title field but to keep the functionality it gives you when adding it to a view?

 thanks!

I've done exactly what you are asking to do -- you basically have two options:

1) Use the Title Field but modify the schema.xml file on your list template which controls the view.  So that even though it is still the Title field, but change the display name.  

2) Create your own custom content type that doesn't use Title.  Not sure if you can do this through the UI though (I create all my content types and site columns through features.)

 

hi,

I try your first option, It's work on the view mode. but in in the edit/new mode I get two columns of Title (I see the display name). When I add data and save it, It remamber only the second one, so if I try to edit it, I see two titles with the same data.

why I get two titles in edit/new mode?

Thanks, Roi

Did you figure this out? I need to do the same thing (change the "Title" display name to something else on my custom content type).

Holy Cats did I screw this up terribly! 

I renamed the Title in one site collection and that Title renaming renamed title for EVERY SINGLE LIST TYPE!  Now EVERY LIST has the content types associated with this one library list.  I have no idea just how that happened but it looks like I'll have to delete the entire site collection and start over.  Sheesh!

Hi,

Hope you haven't deleted your collection yet, or at least that you have proper backup.

It sounds to me like you have renamed site column title of your collection. Either that or you have renamed the Item content type, I'm too tired to figure it out right now.

The solution is as simple as renaming the site column again to Title. Do this either at the root web site settings or using a tool such as SharePoint Manager 2007 (http://www.codeplex.com/spm/).

Cutting your foot off because you put on the wrong shoe is a bi drastic, me thinks...

.b

I didn't kill my site collection but I'm tempted.  Thanks for the tool but for some reason it wouldn't actually access the sites.  It kept giving me an access denied error even though I'm signed in as the server administrator.  Any ideas?

On one site collection, all I have to do IS rename the site column to Title and I have no intention of deleting this site.  On the other, however, the problem is a bit more complex. I'll see if I can explain.

I created a content type called "RFI".  On the base content type, I renamed the Title to "RFI Subject".  I noticed that this changed all my Titles to 'RFI Subject' so I went into my RFI content type, clicked on RFI Subject and went to the Change Site Content Type Column page where I clicked on 'Edit site column in new window'. 

From this new window, I clicked and changed the existing group from _documents to RFI Library Columns.  I expected this to limit this column to RFI's but instead it changed anything using the 'item' Title into an RFI type, having all it's columns, etc.

I hope this clarifies my dilemma some.  I'm fairly new to this end of SharePoint and could use some help when you get the chance.

Red.

For the first question, server admininstrator!=site collection administrator. Check to see that your user name is actually a site collection administrator, not just administrator on the server.

For the remaining descriptions I am sure it makes a lot of sense when you see what you are doing, but I am unable to follow your explanation on some steps, so I need some clarification. What is the 'Base content type'? Is that the Item CT or RFI CT? You say 'Changed all my Titles', does that mean for every content type in your entire site collection? If so you have changed the site column title.

You say you changed group. Do you mean the group of the column? If so that does not add anything to other types, it is merely an arbitrary text that lets you group columns, so there must be something else you did to cause columns to appear in other CTs. I am thinking you might have added columns to the Item content type, from which all other content types inherit. If you restore that CT the added columns should disappear.

.b

Just to either further clarify or muddy the situation, I was creating an RFI Content type based on Document and had added about 20 columns to that type.   I changed the Title to RFI Subject in the content type from Documents and it changed every Document Title column to RFI Subject.  When I changed the Title from _Hidden to 'RFI Content Type', SharePoint added all those 20 columns to my Document and Item base types, which then added them to multiple web parts throughout my site collection. 

So, in this case, I was creating a content type with Document as the base type.  However, when I changed the Title from _Hidden to RFI, it changed not only the document content type, it changed the Item content type, which caused everything that used those types: discussions, libraries, custom lists, tasks and calendars to have an RFI Subject instead of Title in the lists along with all the additional columns.  Obviously, this was not my desired outcome.

My solution was to go into the  SQL Database, ContentTypes table and find the rows with "%Title%" in them.  With some further searches, I found the rows with Name='Title' and StaticName='RFI Subject' and change the RFI Subject back to title.  I also had to change the document type in the line from 'RFI Content Type' back to _Unknown in one line.  I removed the extra columns from Item and Document types but that still didn't fix the web parts.  This corrected the core problem so any new sites or web parts would not have the extra columns, but it did not change the existing screwups.  Since this was a brand new site collection, I deleted most of the corrupted web parts and modified the ones already in use throughout the site collection.  It took the better part a workday to fix it all, but it did work and it would've cost me several days to start from scratch.

Reference:   http://www.jwc3.net/2008/06/change-title-content-type-field-oops.html   (This is the site that got me going in the right direction on this issue.

Hope this clears it up.  However, I wonder if there's an easy way using either Visual Studios or SharePoint Designer to edit or delete those columns.  SD lets us copy but did not seem to have a way to edit the web part columns directly.

Red.