Hiding or inheriting values in columns for subfolders in sharepoint online

Question

I am using power automate to create a new sharepoint folder when a new 'team member' is created in our HRIS. The HR team uses these folders to store all HR files for this employee.

I also need to set a few additional custom columns on this folder, which I can do with power automate. However, any documents added to the folder also display these columns, with blank values, which is confusing for users.

Is it possible to either a) hide the columns in subfolders b) inherit the value from the parent folder

Note that there are no security implications. The same users have access to parent folder and subfolders.

These folders are in their own document library, so I can fully customize the library. The library is in a site that has other HR content as well, so ideally the customizations would be scoped to the library only.

I have tried using custom views, but cannot find a way to set a different default view for the main folder vs the subfolders. I have tried creating a custom folder content type for the site, and enabling it for the library, but it does not change the view.

This post indicates that there is some functionality in the older on prem version called 'per-location view settings' that would allow setting different views for folder vs subfolder, but I cannot find anything about this for sharepoint online.

Any tips / suggestions?

Answer 1

Rather than focusing on configuring the views to have a different view inside the subfolders than for the main library view, I think the easier path here would be to focus on getting the documents to inherit the metadata from the folders they are in.

This is very easily achievable if you use Document Sets instead of plain folders.

There are a number of features that Document Sets provide, such as a custom "welcome page view" that allows you to display specific metadata fields from the folder (not necessarily all of them), the ability to automatically deploy/provision certain documents/templates inside new Document Sets when they are created, etc, but the main one that applies in this case is that you can specify exactly which metadata fields from the Document Set should be inherited by the files within.

Here's an intro to Document Sets on Microsoft, and another blog post about them, but you can certainly find plenty of information about them by searching for "SharePoint Document Sets".