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3.18. Why There's No Event for List Item Views

You may have noticed that there is no event from SharePoint auditing (and therefore LOGbinder for SharePoint) for "List item viewed". All you get are events telling the the overall List was viewed (event ID 49).

On the other hand, for document libraries and documents you get events for when the library is viewed (event ID 48) and when documents are viewed that identity the individual document (47).

This seems like a hole in the SharePoint audit trail at first but when you think about it, it makes sense.

It's easy to audit when a document is viewed but not for list items. You see, the document's contents cannot be displayed as a column in a View, so the viewing or downloading of a document is a very discreet event. On the other hand you can display any and all properties of a list item in a view.

You can potentially view any list item in full detail anytime you view a list. To provide an audit trail of list item views, it would be necessary to output an "item view" event for every item included by the filter criteria of the view each time the view is viewed or refreshed.