I am researching feasibility of going with fully custom Javascript and dynamic HTML-based list item forms (for example, built with React and Office UI Fabric). To be more precise, I am seeking for ways of replacing the stock NewForm/EditForm/DisplayForm single-column form layout with a fully custom form, but at the same time keeping the standard layout with the ribbon and navigation.
Adding the client-side components is the easy part: I am very much aware of CEWP, JSLink, CSR, MDS, SOD and ScriptLink, and I have used all of these in practice. What I am confused with is the lack of a recommended approach to hiding / removing the standard list item form layout.
Of course I did my homework and googled high and low, but that only made me believe there are two "camps":
- People who think one should only hide the ListFormWebPart because of the known issue in older versions of SharePoint.
- Marc Anderson's opinion stating that bullet item #1 above is a myth.
Marc seems to be a recognized SharePoint expert so I am inclined to trust his words. On the other hand, it still keeps me uneasy that there's no official Microsoft "verdict" on this one, and neither is Marc's answer even marked as accepted.
Back to my feasibility research, if #1 is true, then I believe I am running a risk of facing unknown and unwanted side effects of the standard list item form still being rendered by the server (probably not so much of an issue for the display form, but what about potential data versioning conflicts in case of an edit form?)
And if #2 is true, will the ribbon still be functional if I delete ListFormWebPart?
P.S. As a side note, I have considered advanced CSR-based approaches that enable customizing the form layout, but these approaches seem to involve large amounts of jQuery and imperative DOM manipulation which look scary to me after becoming comfortable with the notion of the reactive one-way data flow.
