Expand Person metadata column in SharePoint

Overview

One of the very useful column is People metadata. Usage of this metadata is strongly advised when your column is meant for people that is part of your Active Directory. One sample metadata that is type of people is the Created By and Modified By with the internal name of “Author”. Those 2 are by default available when you create a List or even a document library, an events, calendar, announcements, and many more. People metadata is not like the other types of metadata like Single line of text or number or Multiline, this metadata is an object by design which offer more properties than what we can see. It is hidden by default but we can always get some of its properties by expanding it.

Expand with Rest API

You can expand People metadata properties by accessing its rest api url with

/_api/web/Lists/GetByTitle('listname')/Items?$select=*,CreatedBy/Title, CratedBy/EMail&$expand=CreatedBy

A sample returned object would look like this

Author: {
   EMail: "John.Doe@mycompany.com"
   Title: "John Doe"
}

You can also access the properties you can see in the User Information page. Access it via the URL below

/_layouts/15/userdisp.aspx?Force=true

Property Internal Names

Internal Name	Display Name
ID	ID
Title	Name
Name	Account
FirstName	First Name
LastName	Last Name
Department	Department
JobTitle	Title
EMail	Work-email
WorkPhone	Work Phone
MobilePhone	Mobile Phone
SipAddress	SIP Address
UserName	User Name
Office	Office
Modified	Modified
Created	Created

Explore also objects that are already present like user properties in SharePoint pageContext

Expanding People metadata with PnP

Custom development with SharePoint is really made easy with the help of PnP. Below is how we expand people metadata with it. Its just a simple function that returns list item’s Author name and email.

const _getItem = async (props: {listId: string}) =>{
    return await sp.web.lists.getById(props.listId).items
        .select("Author/Title,Author/EMail")
        .expand("Author")
        .getAll();
};

Just a screenshot of the snippet above for clarity

Now that’s another tip! Hope it helps somehow. Let me know if you have questions or just leave a comment if we missed something.

Happy SharePointing! #SharingIsCaring

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