The Future of SharePoint – Without(?) CSR and JS Link

Microsoft recently announced a new document library experience. Today as part of the May the 4th ‘Future of SharePoint’ event a similar new experience for lists was announced. Ultimately, good moves in the broader effort to improve user experience within SharePoint and an evolution forward. But what, if anything, does this mean for JS Link and Client-Side Rendering (CSR)?

Let’s take a look… I’m not going to give a deep tour of the new interface – that’s for another day. Just focusing on the CSR implications right now.

So, the new list and library interface is locked down. The default page still uses the default chosen view and you can quickly and easily switch views. The page, however, has no editing options. We can’t get to the edit page and edit web part interface. So no-go for CSR. Still, not terrible – while you *could* edit the default page, it wasn’t generally a good practice. (of course, there were some relevant use cases out there…)

Now, if you’re creating pages and adding web parts of these lists and libraries to the page – we’re still in the game. This hasn’t changed… yet. We can still build out pages, add CSR via JS Link and build out our solutions.

So, the short story is that CSR and JS Link still works in 2013, 2016, and O365. There are a few fuzzy spots on the radar for O365 and 2016 though. The new page experience and the new SharePoint Framework are likely to creep into the CSR space. What the roadmap details and timeline are remain to be determined.

Note: If you still need to edit the main library and list pages, you can switch back to ‘classic’ mode. This can be done at the library, site, or site collection levels. Links available below.

References and related materials:

One comment

  1. Good post, I agree that JS and CSR have a big future in SharePoint. Hopefully we get a clearer view of this when the SharePoint framework is released. At the moment, it would seem best practice to only apply JS on pages rather than the form pages (which was always the case).

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