Many times I’ve been asked to adjust the NewForm.aspx (add record) experience for users to display a custom message after submit. A “Thank You” page for a survey is a great example. Other times in request forms people want to show a confirmation or instructions page.
Thankfully the SharePoint product team made this easy for us developers.
Action Steps
- Visit the list or library you’d like to tweak
- Click on New item to get to /NewForm.aspx
- Take a close look at the URL and notice the word “Source=”
- We’ll come back to this in a minute
- To create a “ThankYou.aspx” page I like to duplicate the “DispForm.aspx” by going into SharePoint Designer
- Right click Copy on DispForm.aspx
- Right click and Paste
- Edit the file to remove the main web part
- Rename the file to “ThankYou.aspx”
- Edit the part after the equals sign (=) from #3 and replace with a URL you’d like to take people to after submit
Often the destination page for #5 above doesn’t yet exist. So you’ll want to open SharePoint Designer 2007 and create a new ASPX page to hold a “Thank You” message. For this I always place the ASPX file in the same /Forms/ folder as the list I’m working on.
Why? By placing a custom ASPX in the same /Forms/ folder it will be including in any List template (.STP) creation and is easier for future admin and dev staff to locate for troubleshooting.
