Remove Person/Group Field Link in SharePoint Designer

I had a requirement from one of my clients to create a highly customized view of a task list with a lot of conditional formatting, coloring, etc.  I am not a big SharePoint Designer fan but in this case it was the path of least resistance so I created a custom data view of the Tasks List to meet the requirement.

Problem:

You have a Person or Group Field such as “Assigned To” in your data view webpart and you want to disable the hyperlink that points to that users MySite.

Solution:

Open your data view in SharePoint Designer.  Search the XSL for this line:

xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="@YourFieldName"

**Note the disable output escaping and select lines may be reversed, that’s ok.

Replace that line with the following line:

xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-after(substring-before(substring-after(@YourFieldName, 'ID='), '<'), '>')"

This new code extracts the link and only displays the name.