Here’s another one my improv peeps can ignore.

So here’s the deal: My company has declared that they’re going to be moving our SharePoint installation to Office 365 some time in the not-too-distant future. There go my farm solutions. Add to that the fact that SharePoint 2013 is deprecating the sandbox and the writing on the wall says I’d better learn JavaScript ASAP.

So I work on a sandbox solution (since I’m still on 2010) to deploy some lists, with an included web part that uses JavaScript to query ListData.svc (and do neat stuff with the interface using knockout).

I have a User field in one of the lists called “Owner.” However, when I query ListData.svc, it doesn’t appear. (No, it’s not deferred. It’s just not there. The OwnerId field isn’t there, either.)  I bang my head against the wall a bit.  Then I add another User field to my site columns, content type, and list in Visual Studio.  Still no dice.

Then I think to add a field using the plain-old web interface.  Suddenly it works.  Could I have been defining my User columns incorrectly all this time?

[sourcecode language=”xml”]

[/sourcecode]

(I changed the name of the column, in case “Owner” was a reserved word in OData or something. Don’t judge! I was desperate!)

Apparently, all this time I’d been missing the List=”UserInfo” parameter in my list definitions. And the only… ONLY symptom I’ve ever seen from this is that the field doesn’t appear when queried via the REST interface.

Once again, SharePoint has driven me to distraction (and blog posting).