Formulas: SharePoint Online | JSON Formatting – Conditional Column ‘Display’

/ Charles

The ask, update some JSON column formatting. Someone reworked a Microsoft sample snippet and added a clickable icon to their SharePoint Online document library, but the icon is visible for all library items. For their project, the icon needs to only be available for specific items, not all folders or file types.

Figure 1 - SharePoint Online library with a clickable icon via JSON formatted column.
Figure 1 – SharePoint Online library with a clickable icon via JSON formatted column.

Now, before tweaking the JSON snippet, open the document library’s Advanced settings and toggle “Allow management of content types” to yes. Otherwise, the JSON-to-be won’t recognize the [$ContentType] property:

Figure 2 – SharePoint Online library setting for content type management.

With content type management enabled, format the column in question and add a display parameter to the icon element’s style object. Because the icon shouldn’t be listed for documents, use If-Then conditional logic and hide the icon if the [$ContentType] isn’t a folder:

Figure 3 - SharePoint Online library column formatting with JSON to hide element if not a folder.
Figure 3 – SharePoint Online library column formatting with JSON to hide element if not a folder.

Building on the above snippet, the If-Then logic can use the [$ContentType] property to confirm item type, then use the [$FileRef] property to confirm item name. Now, the JSON snippet checks whether or not the content type is a folder, then checks whether or not the folder’s name is “Scope” or “Deliverable”:

Figure 4 - SharePoint Online library column formatting with JSON to hide element if not specific folders.
Figure 4 – SharePoint Online library column formatting with JSON to hide element if not specific folders.

Conclusion:
JSON is highly extensible and If-Then conditional logic extends it even further. Dynamically show or hide HTML elements using formulas, targeting content types, item names, etc.

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