One of our departments (the Architecture program at our University) has a site that's being built out for an Accreditation Review in February. In that site are several lists and libraries:
- A list of courses
- A list of criteria used to identify content for the the accreditation review board
- A library of "course documents" (a document set per course)
- A library of "student evidence"
Here's the issue: They need to identify specific courses which align with specific criteria and provide the review board an easy way to get to a view of the Student Evidence list filtered by Criteria and Course. They LOVE the "modern library" experience (document previews in particular since these are almost all PDFs), but the only way to get a filtered view in a modern experience is to use the rather verbose "?useFiltersInViewXml=1&FilterField1=" syntax with URL-encoded filter values. I can programmatically build that URL (in either Flow or SPD 2013, but for the longest course names, the URL ends up being nearly 300 characters long. The URL column type has a 255 character limit, so neither method is able to write the URL into the appropriate column.
What I've done for now is replicate what we did in SP2010 (on prem) as a demo. That is, I created a (web part) page called "Evidence" which has a web part for the Student Evidence library and two Query String Filter web parts (one for Criteria and another for Course). By using the ID values of those two lookup fields, the URL is short enough to work. The downside is that they're stuck with the "classic" look (no PDF previews), which is a major issue.
So, what I need is either a way to have a hyperlink field with a URL up to about 300 characters, OR for MS to provide an equivalent to the Query String Filter web part for modern pages.
And before you start throwing out "did you try...", here's what I have tried:
- In SPD, using a multi-line parameter rather than a regular workflow variable - could get it to store the URL, but not format it as a hyperlink
- Replacing the "base" URL (e.g.: "https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/<site>/<library>/<view>") with a shortened URL (from bit.ly)
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
