Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

10.3. Creating Custom Field Controls without Custom Field Types

What happens when you need to simply provide a custom editing experience rather than a unique storage mechanism? While this chapter has focused on creating a custom field control that is paired with a custom field type, another option is to simply create a control that utilizes an existing field type. A possible use of this is when one of the existing field types works just fine for storing the data, such as a simple text field, but users want to modify the editing experience.

A classic example of this is the Telerik RadEditor Lite MOSS Editor control. This control is a feature equivalent control to the RichEditField control included OOTB in MOSS 2007. The primary difference between the two is that the RadEditor control supports multiple browsers, whereas the RichEditField only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer. The RadEditor control, a custom field control, utilizes the same Publishing HTML field type that the RichEditField does — the only difference is in the editing experience.

The Telerik RadEditor Lite MOSS Editor control is covered in more detail in Chapter 14, "Authoring Experience Extensibility."

Creating a custom control that leverages an existing field type is much simpler than linking one with a custom field type. Essentially, the only parts to build are the class that inherits from BaseFieldControl and the rendering template. Once the field control is built and deployed, a developer or designer can ...