How to send a SharePoint list entry form to a thank you page

While there are a number of techniques out there to present users with an alternate location to end up after submitting content to a SharePoint list, this one is quick and easy and effective and worthy of spending 10 minutes documenting on a Friday night (brew in hand).

 

The Business Problem

 

Upon entering data into a SharePoint list, the default behavior is to then send the poster to the default view” page for a SharePoint list. Often, this is AOK. But if you are building an application of sorts in SharePoint, often you will want an alternative to “drive” the user to other content.

 

The Solution

 

1. Create a Web Part Page Library and in it, store a basic web part page with your ‘Thank You’ or other message

2. Use a custom defined URL to notify the browser that after filling out the form, send them to that custom page

 

An Example…

I’m assuming you already know how to create a document library that has a Web Part Page in it. So, go ahead and do that. And give it a smart name like “thanks.aspx” or something obvious. Then, add a content editor web part (CEWP) to that page with your thank you message (or any other instructions you might want to provide the submitter).

 

On to the example…

 

The following SharePoint list is for capturing Parking Tickets that employees which to have reversed (we work in a hockey arena and we all have parking passes that we are supposed to have on the dash of our car, but sometimes people forget and they get tickets that then need to be reversed).

 

Figure 1 – This is the Parking Ticket Entry Form

 

Figure 2 – this is the content of the CEWP on the thanks.aspx page

 

The form above, is the “newform.aspx” for the list called “Parking Tickets”. However, instead of directing users to fill it out the typical way, by choosing NEW from the Parking Tickets list (see image below), we instead create a direct hyperlink to the newform.aspx page and append the following on to the end:

 

?SOURCE=/webpartlibrary/thanks.aspx

 

Thus, if the URL to adding a new entry to your SharePoint Parking Ticket list was http://portal.somewhere.com/corporate/parkingtickets/newform.aspx, you would instead change it to:

http://portal.somewhere.com/corporate/parkingtickets/newform.aspx?source=/webpartlibrary/thanks.aspx

 

Figure 3 – Instead of using the NEW functionality for the list

 

Figure 4 – Create your own hyperlink instead, with the proper syntax at the end

Note, this is an alternate method to the post by Jeff Jones on Endusersharepoint.com (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/07/23/url-source-for-thank-you-on-submit) and provided as sometimes you may still want to have access to the dispform.aspx functionality (not replace it with something that doesn’t display data) or you may not have access (or permission) to use SharePoint Designer. But that technique works too, in a given situation.