The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Here’s something I couldn’t seem to find documented anywhere…

If you’ve programmatically created a new Yes/No field and added it to SharePoint, you don’t want to set the default value like this:

booleanField.DefaultValue = "No";

or

booleanField.DefaultValue = "Yes";

Doing so caused the following error when I was trying to create folders programmatically in the List that was inheriting the Content Type with that field.

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Invalid Yes/No value
A Yes/No field contains invalid data. It should be either 1 or 0. Please check the value and try again.

That made me scratch my head for a while since the property takes a string and the values in the UI when you set it is Yes or No. How you should set that property is:

booleanField.DefaultValue = "0";

or

booleanField.DefaultValue = "1";

Tagged: SharePoint, SharePoint Weirdness, SPFieldBoolean

§ 3 Responses to Programmatically setting the default value of a SPFieldBoolean field

• Serge van den Oever says:

  December 6, 2008 at 1:13 pm

  Again one of those big annoyances in SharePoint. Just like sometimes guids must be provided including brackets, the other time without brackets, of sometimes in CAML that there is a difference between true and TRUE… Welcome to the world of SharePoint…

  Reply
• Robin says:

  December 8, 2008 at 2:36 am

  Had the (almost) same experience! http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Robin/archive/2008/10/21/fields-hidden-from-the-newform-should-have-defaultvalues-set-otherwise-.aspx

  Reply
• Chris says:

  December 8, 2008 at 7:49 am

  Thanks for the heads up. Here’s a similar post for SPFieldLookup fields:

  http://www.sharepointblogs.com/cwogle/archive/2008/01/15/programmatically-set-the-value-of-a-spfieldlookup-list-field.aspx

  Reply