Question

following this MSDN article a CHOICE Element in a field declaration for SharePoint should have a Value attribute.

Value

Optional Text. Specifies the display
text for the choice.

The value can be a reference to a
resource in the format
$Resources:String. However, choice
values are not supported by the
multilingual user interface (MUI).
Choice values are initialized in the
default language of the web site and
do not change when a user switches to
an alternate language supported by the
site.

My current implementation looks like the following and doesn’t work:

<CHOICES>
      <CHOICE Value="Offen">open</CHOICE>
      <CHOICE Value="Duplikat">duplicated</CHOICE>
      <CHOICE Value="In Bearbeitung">inprogress</CHOICE>
      <CHOICE Value="Nicht vorhanden">unavailable</CHOICE>
      <CHOICE Value="Erledigt">finished</CHOICE>
</CHOICES>

VisualStudio 2010 claims, that no schema information for this attribute is found.
Has Microsoft forgotten to implement this or do I understand something fundamentally wrong?

Answer 1

Gotcha:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms439235(v=office.12).aspx

Reading this, you might be led to
believe that you could create a
CHOICES collection like this to have
SharePoint use value codes on the
back-end of its DropDownList’s options
tag in HTML. Like this:

Maryland Delaware Virginia Pennsylvania

Well, you’d be wrong. In fact, as
nearly as I can tell, the Value
attrbiute of this element does nothing
at all. It’s not invalid if you use
it; it doesn’t break anything; it just
doesn’t do anything. And, the
documentation leads you to believe
that it should, which I think has the
potential to cause a huge waste of
time.

If you want a value that is different
than the text, here’s the right way to
do it.

MD#;Maryland
DE#;Delaware
VA#;Virginia
PA#;Pennsylvania
MD

Originally posted as a blog-rant at
http://thomascarpe.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=26.
I’ll update mine if you update yours.
🙂

Thanks to Doc WattsMan for this explanation!