Forum Discussion
Approval Status Column Suddenly Numeric - Due to Column Formatting?
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?
Please consider giving a Like if my post helped you in any way. For SharePoint/Power Platform blogs, visit: Ganesh Sanap Blogs
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": "[$_ModerationStatus]"
"txtContent": "@currentField.displayValue"
As for why this happened? I have no idea. This is a workaround for now.
- Giving you access to the enumeration value is a good change sure, but changing the returned value of an existing variable is not. People have built custom views around this, and to change it is not ok.
Jeff_Lacarte nfsg20 DavidLang Amiryunus SteveB aricornish YeBuu mcancela Duncan2450 Gavin Tully TonieB
This is happening because of recent change in JSON schema to officially support Approval Status column in JSON formatting.
Due to this update, the @currentField and [$_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?
Please consider giving a Like if my post helped you in any way. For SharePoint/Power Platform blogs, visit: Ganesh Sanap Blogs
ganeshsanap thanks for the info and finding this. Further to TonieB 's comments, the wording of the change makes it seem like it only affects those who elected to use a specific field in custom JSON formatting for a very specific purpose. However the fact is this breaks Out-of-the-box formatting found in SharePoint; the field that was changed is the field that was used by OOB formatting and thus the field that everyone used to further customize if they used their own JSON formatting. Because it's what was used internally!
Here is an example: as soon as you turn on Conditional formatting you can see the approval status immediately change to the number '2'. This is OOB behavior, no custom formatting in place. They've broken their own code with this change.