Diary of a SharePoint Developer

For whatever reason if you don’t want users to be able to click on a lookup column in a list, there’s no straight forward method of disabling that link. Here’s the way I disable them in SharePoint 2010, and it wasn’t any different in 2007 either apart from fancy UI.

In the image below, Country is a lookup type of column

 Open the list view in SharePoint designer for modification

 Select the lookup column item and in the document map bar in the bottom, choose the context menu for “xsl:value-of”, and select ”Edit Tag…”

You will see the “Edit Tag” window

The above XPath “$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]” when executed, returns the following hyper link tag

<a onclick=”OpenPopUpPage(‘http://servername/_layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=4&ListId={9CF20D94-56E4-426B-AAA3-97CEA2B23570}&ID=3&RootFolder=*’,RefreshPage); return false;”href=”http://servername/_layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=4&ListId={9CF20D94-56E4-426B-AAA3-97CEA2B23570}&ID=3&RootFolder=*”>United States</a>

In order to get the clean value which is in this case “United States”, we need to remove the decoration around it, so we are going to remove everything before ‘>‘ and after ‘<‘ by changing the tag in the Quick Tag Editor to

<xsl:value-of select=”substring-before(substring-after($thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name],’&gt;’), ‘&lt;’)” disable-output-escaping=”yes”>

Then press the tick button on the “Quick Tag Editor” to save the modified tag, save the page and view it in browser

Links are gone.

Neat, isn’t it?