In this post we will look at a way to set the author byline (shown in the image below) of a modern SharePoint page using PnP PowerShell.
The script
The script to set the author byline in the header can be found here.
_AuthorByline field
Modern pages have a field called _AuthorByLine. When we set the value of this field of a page to the login name (or the email address) of a user, we will see the user details appear in the page header byline. However, as soon as we edit the page those details disappear (or the details of the user that were set before are shown).
It appears that when in view mode of the page, the page header byline loads the data from _AuthorByLine field of the page. (If no data is found then the page header byline tries to get user data from LayoutWebpartsContent field of the page.) Whereas in edit mode, page header byline tries to get user data directly from LayoutWebpartsContent field of the page. Since LayoutWebpartsContent will not have the details of the user the header byline won’t show anything in edit mode.
In the image below we set the _AuthorByLine field of Page-1.aspx and then we get the LayoutWebpartsContent field of the page. We can see that the authors data in the HTML is empty.
So to make this work, along with the _AuthorByLine field, we also need to set LayoutWebpartsContent field of the page with the details of the user.
PnP Core SDK
LayoutWebpartsContent field contains HTML content and to update that field we can rely on the PnP Core SDK. PnP have made our task easy by extracting the HTML content from LayoutWebpartsContent field and mapping them to properties in the PageHeader property of the page. The properties that we are interested in are Authors and AuthorByLine. We need to set these properties and save the page. This will then set the LayoutWebpartsContent property of the page.
When we set the Authors property of PageHeader , PnP Core SDK will also set the _AuthorByLine field of the page. So there is no need for us to worry about setting the _AuthorByLine field separately.
Setting Authors and AuthorByLine properties
The Authors and AuthorByLine properties of PageHeader are of type String . We can set them using PnP PowerShell with the following lines of code.
The entire script can be found here.
We can simply compose the strings in the above format using an email address, run the above two lines and save the page. However, if the email address is invalid then we will face a problem by which an invalid value gets set as the header byline. Therefore, the script checks if the email address passed is valid by using Get-PnPUser and New-PnPUser functions.
Running the script sets the above two properties, saves the page and publishes it. By reloading the page we can see the user information in the page header byline.
Displaying user information
In the view mode, the page header byline gets the user information (like Name, Job Title) from the User Information List for user that is set. If the Job Title doesn’t appear then it might be because it is not yet updated in the User Information List. The information in the User Information List takes a few minutes to update/sync.
In the edit mode (or in view mode when _AuthorByline field is empty) the page header byline picks the user information based on the id set in Authors data of LayoutWebpartsContent .
- If the
idinAuthorsis set to email address of the user then the user information is obtained using Microsoft Graph. - If the
idinAuthorsis set to LoginName of the user (i.e. of the formati:0#.f|membership|...then the user information is obtained using the SharePoint user profile service using REST API (SP.UserProfiles.PeopleManager/GetPropertiesFor).
Summary
To display a user’s information in header byline of a modern SharePoint page, we need to set _AuthorByline and LayoutWebpartsContent field of the page. We can do that using PnP PowerShell by setting the Authors and AuthorByline properties of the PageHeader property of a page.
