MOSS: The dreaded schema.xml

My colleague Tad sent me a link to Andrew Connell’s post: A Quicker Way to Create Custom SharePoint List Templates with the comment - ‘I guess “quicker” is relative.’  Tad’s right – this seems to be going too far for a simple schema.xml file.
Much of Andrew’s post is valid – there’s not much doing getting around the Content Types and the List Template (if you need them), and using the OOTB list interface plus Keutmann’s excellent SharePoint Manager tool  to build queries is a simple workaround, but I’m balking on his approach for creating the the List’s schema.  If you take Andrew’s approach, you’re gonna end up with a MINIMUM of 1600 lines of xml in your schema: my approach is far simpler; below is a fully functioning schema that’s only 30+ lines – see if you can spot the magic bullet…:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<List xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" Id="{AB426CDE-98F2-432A-B296-880C7931DEF3}"

     Title="Setting" Url="Lists/Setting" BaseType="0"

     FolderCreation="FALSE" DisableAttachments="TRUE" VersioningEnabled="FALSE"

     Direction="$Resources:Direction;"

     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

       <MetaData>

              <Fields>

                     <Field Type="Text" Name="Title" DisplayName="Name" Required="TRUE" />

                     <Field Type="Text" Name="Value" DisplayName="Value" Required="TRUE" />

              </Fields>

              <Views>

                     <View BaseViewID="0" Type="HTML" WebPartZoneID="Main" DisplayName="All Items" DefaultView="TRUE"

                         MobileView="True" MobileDefaultView="False" SetupPath="pages\viewpage.aspx"

                         ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/issues.png" Url="AllItems.aspx">

                           <ViewStyle ID="17"/>

                           <RowLimit Paged="TRUE">100</RowLimit>

                           <Toolbar Type="Standard" />

                           <ViewFields>

                                  <FieldRef Name="Edit" />

                                  <FieldRef Name="Title"/>

                                  <FieldRef Name="Value"/>

                           </ViewFields>

                           <Query>

                                  <OrderBy>

                                         <FieldRef Name="Title"/>

                                  </OrderBy>

                           </Query>

                     </View>

              </Views>

              <Forms>

                     <Form Type="DisplayForm" Url="DispForm.aspx" SetupPath="pages\form.aspx" WebPartZoneID="Main" />

                     <Form Type="EditForm" Url="EditForm.aspx" SetupPath="pages\form.aspx" WebPartZoneID="Main" />

                     <Form Type="NewForm" Url="NewForm.aspx" SetupPath="pages\form.aspx" WebPartZoneID="Main" />

              </Forms>

              <DefaultDescription>Settings used in the application.</DefaultDescription>

       </MetaData>

</List>

Yep, it’s the ViewStyle tag I wrote about back in 2007.  It eliminates that 90% of the schema file that Andrew suggests you ignore, leaving a fairly terse xml that can actually be digested and debugged (sort of).