Wouter

As any SharePoint aficionado I spend quite some time in decompilers to find out why and how certain bits of SharePoint work. Today I came across a beauty that explains to some degree why for GUID values you sometimes must have {curly braces}.

The following screenshot is of the BaseXsltDataWebPart, the base class for all views in SharePoint. Notice the 'IsGuid' method and how it is hardcoded to check whether there are curly braces in the string formatted GUID. Funky stuff! This method is used by the base class to read fields from the list being queried. It is already widely known that you must have curly braces in field IDs, and you can have curly braces in most other places. Now you know why!