Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

Thrilling title, eh? So, previously I’ve talked about merged lists in the Dataview web part. This time, I was after something slightly different – rather than merging two lists, I wanted to join them.

Joining is pretty easy, actually, but the process is a little bizarre. I ended up using the post ‘Performing Joins with SharePoint Lists‘ by Sahil Malik. The thing that confused me was that when I was I expected to provide the ‘keys’ of my lists when I created the new Datasource – but actually, you define it when you insert your ‘joined subview’.

Anyway, the scenario was that there are customer purchases for ‘Credits’ to do things. Operatives then do things for them, and these actions subtract time off those pools of credits. The need was for a way to:

• Record purchases of pools of credits. Customers may purchase multiple  times, but under different agreements (or invoices, or whatever)
• Record actions and the number of credits that they cost
• Remaining total.

I solved this with a Dataview web part, and two lists. Read more »

Tags: Dataview, XSL

I’d a question from a reader (gee, I have readers!) about doing content rollup using the DataView web part. He was asking if he could use the DataView web part even though the things he was pulling into his Data Source didn’t all have the same columns. Would this work? Well, one way to find out… Read more »

Tags: Content Rollup, Dataview

SharePoint is made up of lists of items, where an item is a set of data. Here is the standard display of an item’s properties:

As you can see, we’ve got a item, and it has some fields of data, and they’re being displayed inside a web part. Those fields are columns on the list:

All very familiar, I’m sure. It gets interesting when we start using Lookup columns, though. These are columns that refer to items in other lists. For example, this is a list of documents, but they refer to items in the above list (that’s what the Item Ref column is doing):

Cool, but wouldn’t it be great if I could show a list of items referring to a particular item on it’s display page? For example, in this case wouldn’t it be good to show a list of ‘Item Documents’ on the DispForm.aspx page used to show the Item’s properties? Well, you can:

(Edit: one of my colleagues points out that Microsoft did this in one of the Fab 40 templates – but I didn’t know).

So how does it work? Read more »

Tags: Dataview, List Forms, ListItem

The Data View Web Part is sort of the Swiss-army knife of displaying data in SharePoint. It’s an Out-of-Box web part, and while it is typically focussed on showing items from a single list, it is capable of showing data from merged lists.

Here’s an example of a Data View Web Part showing the same data as our examples from the Content Query Web Part

It’s advantages are:

• Can show a view with user defined filtering, grouping and sorting.
• Has pagination of results
• Showing extra columns of data is easy to add
• Can filter the results by Content Type, or Metadata field values
• Cheap (Out-of-box)
• Designing the view is easy

It’s disadvantages are:

• Requires SharePoint Designer – and therefore a suitably technical user
• Can only query and merge results from a fixed set of sites – there is no ‘All Site collection’ or ‘This site and subsites option’
• Limited by site collection boundary

In Short: Flexible in the views it presents, but it’s actual ability to roll up data is limited and could require constant maintenance. Requires someone fairly technical with SharePoint Designer to set view up. Read more »

Tags: Content Rollup, Dataview, Web Parts