Lessons Learned from Troubleshooting Colour Calendar

14May10

I have a client that wanted some color coding of their SharePoint calendars.

I installed “Colour Calendar” from CodePlex: http://planetwilson.codeplex.com/

I have used this solution many times as it provides great functionality, which I can’t believe Microsoft left out of MOSS 2007.  I am happy to report that color calendars are available in SharePoint 2010.

I have my solution deployed, activated for my site collection.  I add the color decoder web part added to my calendar’s page and I proceed to enable the functionality on my calendar.

When I click “Enable Colour Calendar”, I received the following error:

I proceeded to troubleshoot with a new instance of a calendar, proceed with the same web part installation, enabling procedure and I do not receive the error.  I am able to enable the feature and color code my calendar entries until I am blue in the face.

So, what is going on?

For my calendar that I did not receive the error, I noticed that when you enable the color calendar functionality, it adds two columns:

“Event Category” is your drop down list of, what else, categories which are then color coded.  “Event Category Title” is used to generate the title of the event.  You will notice that it is a calculated field which uses the [Title] in its formula.

For calendars where I received the error, I see that “Event Category” is created (although it does not populate the choice list), but it does not create the calculated column.

I figure that if it’s using “Title” in the formula, either they had deleted the column from the list, or they had renamed it.

Sure, enough…no “Title”…

Using SharePoint Manager 2007 (another invaluable tool for a SharePoint architect), I verified that it had been renamed:

If I rename the column back to “Title”, I can now properly enable the functionality.  I can now rename the Title column back to whatever I want, the functionality remains because the calculated column can figure out that Title is now “” and the formula is updated.

So what is the moral of the story?

That CodePlex is bad and that open source solutions have no place in SharePoint?

NO!

The moral of the story is, don’t rename out-of-the-box or default columns.  You never know when a service pack might update them or when something might reference them which could, as we saw, break.

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