It’s called “All Items” for a reason!

One of the users where I work called in a panic. She had just finished creating an important document and saved it to SharePoint but she could not find it in the library. Before she called me, she checked all the views to make sure it wasn’t there, checked her local drafts folder to make sure it wasn’t checked out and it wasn’t anywhere she looked.


For troubleshooting, I looked in the checked out files to make sure that there was no required field that was empty and preventing the document from showing up. I checked her permissions, and checked that she had, at one time, been able to upload and modify documents in this library. Nothing.

It was indeed perplexing.


Now, I know that all the SharePoint opposers are probably out there, saying, “See? You can’t trust SharePoint with your documents! This never would have happened with a network drive!” She was certainly one of them. She could not believe that SharePoint had “betrayed” her and vowed to save everything to her hard drive before uploading it. Well, she was right about one thing - it never would have happened on a network drive. The reason is that network drives do not allow us to sort and filter views of our documents by metadata.


The issue in this case, was that someone made a change to the AllItems.aspx view that suppressed documents with a particular set of metadata. Because our user did not set the filter rules on the view, she was unaware of this. Instead, she saved her document to the library, applied the metadata tags, and blamed SharePoint for losing her document.


The moral of the story? Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. SharePoint gives us a lot of opportunity to help make our work lives easier, but it also provides ample means of hosing us, too. Make sure when you are creating or modifying views, leave the AllItems.aspx view as it stands so you always have a view of library that displays all the documents.