Steven Van de Craen's Blog

Issue

One issue you might see when upgrading your content to a newer version of SharePoint is that not all views in SharePoint Lists and Libraries are upgraded.

• SharePoint 2007 uses Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ListViewWebPart for rendering a list
• SharePoint 2010 uses Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart, and normally all Web Parts should be upgraded

What I’ve seen on multiple occasions is that some views aren’t upgraded. You can most easily spot them because there are no (multiselect) checkboxes on that view, even if you check “Tabular view” in the view settings.

Furthermore, if you append ?contents=1 to the URL you’ll see that the legacy ListViewWebPart class is used, rather than the new XsltListViewWebPart class.

Checkboxes missing:

Checkboxes present:

Manual fix

A manual fix would be to edit the page, go to the Web Part properties and just save without making any modifications. This seems to convert the legacy Web Part to the newer equivalent.

This would require quite some effort if you have many libraries of course.

Automated fix

I’ve been trying to reproduce the mechanism used by the manual fix described above, but not dice. The best I came up with is cloning the SPView and deleting the original one.

The base of the application will loop an entire Site Collection, through all sites, lists and views that match the prerequisite “IsLegacyWebPart”.

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(url))
{
    // All webs in site collection
    site.AllWebs.Cast<SPWeb>().ForEach(w =>
        {
            using (SPWeb web = w)
            {
                // All lists in web
                web.Lists.Cast<SPList>().ToList().ForEach(l =>
                {
                    // All legacy views
                    l.Views.Cast<SPView>().ToList().Where(v => v.IsLegacyWebPart()).ForEach(v => v.Recreate());
                });
            }
        });
}

The “IsLegacyWebPart” check is an extension method that looks up the Web Part bound to the given SPView. If this is the legacy ListViewWebPart it will return true. I have yet to find a more optimized way of detecting a ‘legacy’ view.

public static bool IsLegacyWebPart(this SPView view)
{
    bool result = false;

    SPList list = view.ParentList;
    SPWeb web = list.ParentWeb;
    SPFile file = web.GetFile(view.ServerRelativeUrl);

    using (MSWPP.SPLimitedWebPartManager man = file.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared))
    {
        result = man.WebParts.OfType<MSWPP.ListViewWebPart>().Any();
    }

    return result;
}

Finally we have the “Recreate” algorithm for all legacy views.

public static void Recreate(this SPView view)
{
    if ((view == null) || String.IsNullOrEmpty(view.Title))
        return;

    // Init
    SPList list = view.ParentList;
    string viewName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(view.Url);
    string viewTitle = view.Title;

    // Create temporary clone
    SPView tempView = view.Clone("TEMP", "TEMP");
    view.Delete();

    // Create definite clone
    SPView newView = tempView.Clone(viewName, viewTitle);
    tempView.Delete();
}

public static void Delete(this SPView view)
{
    view.ParentList.Views.Delete(view.ID);
}

public static SPView Clone(this SPView view, string newViewName, string newViewTitle)
{
    SPView result = view.Clone(newViewName, view.RowLimit, view.Paged, view.DefaultView);
    result.Title = newViewTitle;
    result.TabularView = view.TabularView;
    result.Update();

    return result;
}

The “Recreate” extension method works with an intermediary temporary cloned view, because the view name has to be unique. If you clone a view with the same title/name it would be named “title1”.

The “Clone” method explicitly sets the “TabularView” property. I’m unaware if other properties need to be explicitly defined.

Download

I’ve wrapped it as a console application that needs to run locally on a SharePoint server. You need to run it as an account with sufficient permissions to manipulate views in the Site Collection.

Feel free to incorporate this in your application if you find it useful.

Note that not all hits will be solved, even with multiple runs of this tool. For example all Galleries will keep on using the ListViewWebPart. Another example are some special views on the blog site.

• TOOL
• SOURCE CODE (Visual Studio 2010)

Hope this helps!