I was working with a customer on building a glossary in SharePoint. We had a list of terms, containing things link ‘Term’, ‘Description’ and ‘First Letter’. They wanted, on a page for the site, to show the terms, and allow filtering based on the first letter.

I set up a page with a ListView web part and a filter web part. The filter web part would supply the letter we wanted to filter by to the ListView, which would then filter on the first letter column. As a side note, I started by using the Choice Filter web part, which isn’t just a drop-down list but is rather uglier – so in the end I just used a QueryString Filter web part and built my own navigation for the filter. This was why I ended up looking at how to show query string parameters within a page.

Anyway, this worked nicely – except that the ‘First Letter’ column on a web part is a little redundant if you are filtering by that letter already. Thus, we tried removing that column from the list view web part, and got the spurious message:

This page has exceeded its data fetch limit for connected Web Parts. Try disconnecting one or more Web Parts to correct the problem

Initially I thought that this was because we had 700 items in the actual glossary I was now building against (previously I’d just prototyped it with a half dozen items) – but to not be able to filter over that is pretty rubbish. However, when I put the ‘First Letter’ column back into the ListView, the error went away. So, if you get this error, make sure the thing you are filtering by is visible as a column in the ListView.