Hide the Attachments Link in a SharePoint Form

 

The problem… While we do want site visitors to see the list items, we don’t want them to see or click the list’s attachments.

More SharePoint Customization tricks!
More Site Owner articles.
More articles about the SPSecurityTrimmedControl

One approach is to use CSS and a handy SharePoint control. You could also write a JavaScript solution. Here we will look at the CSS option.

Note: This is not security! This is hiding some HTML using CSS. Users can right-click and select View Source to discover the text hidden by the CSS.

 

General pattern:

1. View the DispForm.aspx page (the view properties popup in SP 2010) for an item in the list.
2. Press F12 to open the IE Developer Tools.
3. Use the Internet Explorer F12 panel’s Select Element button to discover an appropriate tag and ID that could changed by CSS to show/hide the content.  (For this example it happens to be “idAttachmentsRow”.)
   
4. Edit the DispForm.aspx page using SharePoint Designer.
5. Add CSS to hide the tag from everyone.
6. Add a SharePoint control with additional CSS to unhide the content for users with at least the Edit permission. Set the SharePoint control to only display its content for people who can edit list items.

The SPSecurityTrimmedControl

The magic here is that the SPSecurityTrimmedControl can selectively display content based on a user’s assigned permission. As an example, users with the Read permission level do not have the EditListItems permission while members and owners do. Note that the control can only be set to a single permission, not a Permission Level or group.

More detailed steps:

1. Open SharePoint Designer and your site.
2. Click Lists and Libraries and your list.
3. Click the DispForm.aspx file.
4. In the ribbon click Advanced Mode.
5. Find the PlaceholderMain Content tag (<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server">)
6. Add the following block of HTML just after that tag.
7. Save your changes and test.

 

SharePoint 2010 (and probably 2007) version:

<style type="text/css">
  #idAttachmentsRow { display:none }
</style>
<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="EditListItems">
  <style type="text/css">
    #idAttachmentsRow { display:inline }
  </style>
</Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online / O365 (and probably 2016) version:

<style type="text/css">
  #idAttachmentsRow { display:none !important }
</style>
<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="EditListItems">
  <style type="text/css">
    #idAttachmentsRow { display:table-row !important}
  </style> 
</Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

A list of the PermissionsStrings can be found here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx

More about using SPSecurityTrimmedControl can be found here: http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/07/sharepoint-run-javascript-based-on-user.html

 

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