Monday, January 24, 2011

Changing Links List In SharePoint 2007 To Open In New Browser Window

I was recently looking for the easiest way to modify the links list in SharePoint 2007 to open the links in a new window.  In my case, every link in a links list points to an external site, so they should all be opening a new browser window.

There were a couple custom features I found, but most required modifying (or replacing) the existing links lists, something that I did not want to do.  Anyway, here's how to make the change (note:  I modified the original files, this probably isn't a best practice, and the changes could be lost by updates from Microsoft).

First, open the schema file for the links list feature.  In my case, it was located at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\LinksList\Links\schema.xml

In this file there should be two instances of the following:

<Column Name="URL" HTMLEncode="TRUE" /><HTML><![CDATA[">]]></HTML>

Replace them both with this:

<Column Name="URL" HTMLEncode="TRUE" /><HTML><![CDATA[" target="_blank">]]></HTML>

Then restart IIS (or just the application's worker process), and now all the links in your links lists should open a new browser window!

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