The ListItemProperty Web Control

The issue: in the forms.aspx page, the <SharePoint:ListItemProperty> should render the Title field in the SPListItem. Sure it works. Almost as you would expect. My title is 255 characters but the MaxLength property is set to 40 in the forms.aspx. Nice. But no... All characters are rendered. Why? Search on google: nothing. Reflector (thanks Lutz Roeder for saving my life so many times!): yes!

Looking again at the web control you might notice that the Property property is not set to "Title" so you can assume that it is the default property to render, and yes it is. But when looking at the code you can see that if the property isn't set to anything, the control renders simply SPContext.Current.ListItemDisplayName. It doesn't truncate the output to match the MaxLength property. But when the Property property is set in the web control, the Render method uses the SPWeb.Request.RenderColumn method which takes all properties, including MaxLength.

So since it actually affects all lists you could actually edit the actual form.aspx file in the Pages folder in the hive. I don't since it's a out-of-the-box file, it's simple enough to use a copy.