Modify the Display Forms – Sharepoint Designer

If you want to try and modify the Display Form of a document library using SPD, you should be aware of the following problems:

1. Deleting the existing web part on the page and adding new content might break the document library. (When you click on View Properties of an item, it redirects the user to the root site)
2. Modifying the existing web part, might work but it could break the edit forms functionality.

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To understand what is breaking the document library, do the following:

1. Change the display form.This is most probably going to break the DisplayForm functionality.
2. If it does, save the document library as a template.
3. Download the template and rename the file as [name].cab
4. Open up the schema.xml and find the "Forms" tag.
5. Here you will notice that the URL for the DisplayForm is missing. This is why the user is redirected to the root site.

Some how, SPD, while saving the document library, does not save the DisplayForm URL correctly.

The workaround I have found to this is to hide the existing content in the Dispform.aspx and add your own content to the form. By not deleting the existing webparts and not creating a new aspx file, it works fine.