Forum Discussion

Brass Contributor

Nov 05, 2021

Solved

Approval Status Column Suddenly Numeric - Due to Column Formatting?

I'm working in my tenant and noticed an issue with all of my lists that have content approval turned on. The approval status column now lists a number instead of the words "Approved" | "Rejected" | "...

SharePoint Online

ganeshsanap
Nov 16, 2021
Jeff_Lacarte nfsg20 DavidLang Amiryunus SteveB aricornish YeBuu mcancela Duncan2450 Gavin Tully TonieB

This is happening because of recent change in JSON schema to officially support Approval Status column in JSON formatting.
Due to this update, the @currentField and [$_ModerationStatus] will resolve to internal code (enum value) and @currentField.displayValue and [$_ModerationStatus.displayValue] will resolve to the localized string (I guess according to language).

The Microsoft official docs will be updated with more info in the coming weeks. You can check the details for now at: SharePoint Online Column Formatting for Approval Status: uses language specific text?
Related Read: How to find the Internal name of columns in SharePoint Online?
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Jeff_Lacarte

Brass Contributor

Nov 08, 2021

Fixed it with a workaround, but it's still an issue. I can't be expected to use a workaround for every list that I need to apply conditional formatting to the approval status column.

By going into advanced mode to work with the formatting JSON directly I could see:

"txtContent": "[$_ModerationStatus]"

which is displays the value for a given item in a row of the column.

Through trial and error and referencing the https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/declarative-customization/formatting-syntax-reference, I found that you can use '@currentField', which also displayed the numeric value of the approval status. However, once I added '.displayValue' the text value showed up again!

"txtContent": "@currentField.displayValue"

As for why this happened? I have no idea. This is a workaround for now.

TonieB

Copper Contributor

Nov 09, 2021

This problem suddenly started for me today on all libraries where there is formatting on the Approval Status column. The problem is not resolved by turning off the column formatting. When I turn off the column formatting, now instead of a number the Approval Status column is blank. I had to go then into the Advanced link and delete the json code, which should already disappear when I turned off the column formatting. I don't see any other info on this issue except for your post, but surely this must be occurring due to some Microsoft change. (My Approval Status columns have been formatted for over a year and I have made no recent changes to my site or libraries.) Jeff_Lacarte