How to author Movie/Flash in SharePoint Publishing Site with minimum coding

Displaying Movie content is a common requirement in a Publishing Site. The typical behavior is as the following:

In Authoring/Edit Mode, content authors can choose which movies to display.

In Display Mode, end users will see the movie or just a link to the movie, clicking the link will pop up a dialog to show the movie.

The behavior is very similar to the out of box “RichLinkField” (Publishing Hyperlink). Actually, they have the exact same Edit Mode behavior. The only difference is that “Publishing Hyperlink” will render Anchor link in display Mode whereas Displaying Movie needs to render different HTML segment depending on how to play movie.

So, instead of building a custom SharePoint Field Type, we just need to build a custom SharePoint field control, which inherits from out-of-box “RichLinkField” class and overrides “RenderFieldForDisplay” method. The field control will present the same Edit Mode behavior as Publishing Hyperlink while in Display model; it renders the HTML/JavaScript for displaying Movie.

The approach is very simple and effective. It demonstrates the power of SharePoint’s extensibility.