Content Roll-up options Part IV – Lightning Tools Conductor

2008-07-222014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, Lightning Tools, SP2007 Architecture, SP2007 Development, Web Parts1 Comment

From Lightning Tools, the folks who brought us the BDC Metaman (awful name, good product) comes their ‘Lightning Conductor’ web part. Again, a slightly strange name (it isn’t copper and it doesn’t poke out from the top of a church roof). So what does it look like:

Okay, so it looks similar to the data view web part (apart from the ‘trial version’ message!), but it has the same sorts of roll up options to the Content Query web part. One of the things that impressed me about this web part was actually the configuration screens in SharePoint:

The main settings form is a well laid out, clear (if somewhat long) form. It just looks right.

The other significant administration screen with it is selection what columns you want to show, and their order, and any sorting or grouping.

Now that is much easier than displaying extra columns in the Content Query Web Part (or the Data View Web Part, come to that. Again, quite a long form, but clear, and trust me, easier than writing XSL 🙂

I did have a couple of little problems with it, though. Firstly, for some reason it didn’t seem to want to show me my Project or Project Status columns in the ‘Filters’ section, so I couldn’t restrict my view by these fields. I may have configured something wrongly that this wasn’t possible.

The other thing that struck me was that while the web part does have column headings that the user can click to sort by, there is no icon to tell them what column they’re sorting by already, or whether it is sorting ascending or descending.

So, it’s advantages:

Good user interface. I could imagine non-technical people being able to set up their own views.
Can consolidate across Multiple Site Collections (which isn’t possible through the Out-of-box options)
Can consolidate a single site collection, a site and it’s subsites or a specific list.
Can filter by list type
Can filter by content type or meta data fields (though I had a problem with them)
Can Group results
Has user definable sorting (but needs a little arrow to show which column is being sorted, and in what order)
Has Pagination of results.
Can define view by XSL if you really want to.

It’s disadvantages:

Costs money (though I think is still a bargain compared to developer time)
Could be a tough sell to customers (“But SharePoint already has the Content Query Web Part“)

In short: It’s what everyone really wished that the Content Query Web Part actually was.

So, I’m quite impressed by the Lightning Conductor Web Part, but what of the other commercial option I’m reviewing – Bamboo’s List Roll-Up Web Part?

Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part IV – Lightning Tools Conductor” →

Content Roll-up options Part III – Data View Web Part

2008-07-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, Dataview, SP2007 Architecture, SP2007 Development, Web Parts1 Comment

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. Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part III – Data View Web Part” →

Content Roll-up options Part II – Content Query Web Part

2008-07-182014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, CQWP, SP2007 Architecture, SP2007 Development, Web Parts3 Comments

The Content Query Web Part is the Out-of-Box content roll-up web part in MOSS, and consequently it’s one of the most widely used.

Here’s an example of one rollup up the ‘Project Documents’ type:

It’s advantages are:

Can select from an entire Site Collection, a Site and it’s Sub-Sites, or from a List
Can select by List type
Can filter the results by Content Type, or Metadata field values
Can be configured to do Sorting and Grouping
Can display custom data – but this is a little complex

It’s disadvantages are:

Customising the view is possible, but tricky.The view has to be defined in XSL, and the Content Query Web part configured correctly to get the data you want to display.
No pagination of results – it’s just truncated.
The user can’t select the results order, or add his own filter.
You can’t query across Site collections.

All in all, I’d say that defining the styles for what you want to display puts this into more a ‘development’ task, which isn’t ideal if you’re trying to push administration out to your users a bit more.

Also, a major issue as far as I’m concerned is the lack of pagination. You can limit the number of items shown, but without an link to the next ‘page’ of items.

Here’s an example of a Content Query Web Part showing some custom data (highlighted in yellow):

In short: Cheap, and available, but has that ‘just a bit awkward’ feel to setting it up, and lacks some of the features you’re likely to want. Often will require someone a bit technical for customisation. Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part II – Content Query Web Part” →

Content Roll-up options Part I – Introduction

2008-07-172014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, SP2007 Architecture, SP2007 Development, Web Parts2 Comments

Well, I’ve been asked to examine some of the options for doing content roll-up in SharePoint. I thought I’d present this as a bit of a mini-series, rather than one huge post.

What is content roll-up? Simply, it’s about pulling data from different locations in SharePoint into a single view, and presenting it to the user in a consolidated form. This is a pretty common task in SharePoint. For example, think of things like roll-up of News items from the sites in your site collection. That’s actually built into the Collaboration site template:

I’ve bracketed both the web parts being used with red and blue – otherwise it’s not clear that there are two web parts doing content roll-up here – one for the most recent headline, and another to show a list of recent News items.

There are lots of other examples of where this is useful – consolidation of tasks for a user is another common requirement, or rolling-up all the documents of one type or another – such as expenses, etc..

Anyway, over the next week or so I’ll examine some of the solutions to content roll-up that I’ve seen. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list – there are quite a lot of solutions to content roll-up around, and you can write your own – but why reinvent the wheel?

| Introduction | Content Query Web Part | Data View Web Part |

| Lightning Conductor Web Part | Bamboo’s List Roll-Up Web Part | Conclusions |

Column Names when setting up the Content Query Web Part

2008-07-152014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, CQWP, SP2007 Development, Web PartsLeave a comment

So, I’ve been asked to do a look at content roll up options in SharePoint, such as the Content Query Web Part (CQWP), and one of the things I’ve been asked to do is to make it display custom column data. Now, there are lots of articles about this – on MSDN (here and here), Steven Van de Craen has an article about it, and there are lots of other articles about it (those were just the best resources I came across in a quick search). ‘Cos of that, I won’t repeat ’em – I’ll just summarise the steps:

Add extra columns to the selected data (CommonViewFields) by exporting, editing and importing the web. part.
Add a new display format to the ItemsStyle.xsl file.

Okay, so I did this, and one of my extra columns of data I wanted to present was shown (‘Project’), but the
other (‘Project Status’) wasn’t. What was going on?

Well, I sort of figured it was the space in the name – SharePoint does a funny encoding of spaces to _x0020_ which is annoying, and often causes errors. Anyway, I opened up SharePoint Manager to check what the field was called internally – and sure enough, it was called Project_x0020_Status. Fair enough, I’d got the internal name right, but using that still didn’t work.

I decided in the end to have a look at what the fields the CQWP was retrieving. But how to? I could define my own XSL, but I didn’t know what use to get the list of fields. Well, I found the answer on Bart Callaerts web site (actually, there is another good ‘how to customise the CQWP article). Anyway, I’m shamelessly plagiarising just in case that page in unavailable.

His idea was to define an Item Style to show all the columns of the retrieved items. The code for this is:

<xsl:template name="ViewFields" match="Row[@Style='ViewFields']" mode="itemstyle"> <xsl:for-each select="@*"> P: <xsl:value-of select="name()" /> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template>

And you can download a copy here – copying and pasting from this page can screw up so of the characters.

Anyway, I used this view to see my items:

Looking through that list of fields, I saw that the name of my column (according to the CQWP) is now Project_x005F_x0020_Status. That’s a bit strange, and I don’t know why that’s happened. I guess that Michael Hoffer’s suggestion (don’t use spaces in the names when you create the columns – add them later) is a good one – I reckon it’d have saved me this trouble!

Anyway, this suggestion worked nicely. I’ve highlighted my data in yellow:

How do I get rid of the Action Links on my Search Results Page?

2008-06-042014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Search, Web PartsLeave a comment

I wanted to get rid of the Action Links on a standard Search Results page in SharePoint:

So I opened up my search page in SharePoint Designer. This always looks a bit cluttered, but I went to my Core Search Results Web Part to modify it’s ShowActionLinks property.

I’ve scribbled on this to highlight the obvious web parts on the page. The Core Results web part is highlighted in cyan. Anyway, if you look at the code in the top of the screenshot you can see that the ShowActionLinks setting is already False. Eh? Continue reading “How do I get rid of the Action Links on my Search Results Page?” →

Using a Query String parameter in the Search Results Web Part

2008-05-142014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Search, Web Parts4 Comments

Further work on fixing a colleague’s code. Like some of the posts I’ve found, he seems to have thought that to get the query string parameter he’d have to use Javascript – something like this. However, I found myself thinking of the Data View web part – it allows parameters based on the query string. Most people know about that. What I found, and what I think some folks don’t realise, is that the Search Core Results Web Part allows you to have query string parameters too… Continue reading “Using a Query String parameter in the Search Results Web Part” →

How do I get the XML of my search results?

2008-05-092014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Search, Web Parts4 Comments

So I’ve just started customising SharePoint Search results for the first time. It’s an area that I’ve never really touched before, to be honest – I’ve set up the crawling, and that’s the limit. Now I find myself reverse engineering a colleagues code in order to fix it.

Well, from what I can fathom, SharePoint search results actually come from the Search.asmx webservice in the _vti_bin of your site. The results are actually returned as XML, and in the web parts (not sure which ones, but certainly the Search Core Results web part) you then render this XML to HTML via XSLT. (If that means nothing to you, I’m afraid you’ll have to look it up. That concept is a whole can of worms. Maybe even a crate of worms. Anyway…)

An obvious question is, what does that source XML look like. Well, it’s whatever you get back from the web service, and there are various ways of find that, but I found a neat little solution on a post from Tobias Zimmergren’s blog (in fact, it’s an interesting looking series for a search rookie like myself – I think I’ll have to read that). I’ll blatantly plagiarise that in a bit. Basically, his idea was to define some XSLT that just emits the XML unaltered, and then look at what you’re getting back from the search service on the search results page.

So, to test, I copied the normal search results page (mine was in a search center) to give myself somewhere isolated to test in. I went to it – and it was all empty. Not surprising – there were no web parts. I added a Search Core Results web part:

You might want to add a Search Box web part to give yourself somewhere to enter your search terms, though I’m a bit of a geek and was typing directly into the URL of the browser. For example,
?k=barnacles
will search for documents about, um, barnacles.

Fine. Now we need to apply the XSLT. Edit the Search Core Results Web Part:

and edit the XSL:

Blatant Plagiarism alert – Tobias’ XSL was just:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

Note: Don’t just copy the above text – use this link. WordPress has changed the speechmarks in the code above, and it won’t work.

Apply it and voila – XML:

Now I can get on with Styling it.

Styles in the Summary Links Web Part

2008-04-282014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Admin, SP2007 Branding, SP2007 Development, Web Parts4 Comments

So, I’d been asked to look at building a links menus something like this:

I thought that this was quite nice. I wondered if I could make something similar to this using the Summary Links web part – curiously, it’s something I’ve never really used, and I though I remembered seeing that it could show images too. So, I set up some examples… Continue reading “Styles in the Summary Links Web Part” →

Pimp my SharePoint Part II – Beyond Just Colours

2008-04-032014-11-30 Andy BurnsMaster Pages, SP2007 Branding, Themes, Web Parts1 Comment

Previously I’ve written about branding in SharePoint and the technologies involved. However, there is more to branding than just the technologies used and the colours you want, which was what that post focussed on. Really, it’s more a question of style and content than just colour and pictures. This makes it all a good deal more complicated though, which emphasises the need for proper management of the work and for it to be treated as a proper project.

To recap on the technologies used in MOSS branding, briefly:

Master Pages – can change everything
Themes – can change the colour of elements and the background images.
Web Parts – can change the layouts of pages and some of the appearance.
Combination thereof.

The two main technologies discussed in branding are Master Pages and Themes, and a good description is:

[Themes are] Akin to painting a house new colors and changing the pictures on the walls. [Master Pages are] Akin to remodelling the whole house
Heather Solomon

Well, recent experience of branding and some interesting slides by Heather Solomon have driven home some other points. Note that these apply to MOSS but not WSS (which only has ‘basic’ pages). The ultra high level view of what I’ve learnt is:

Just saying ‘X days to do branding’ is not a good idea.
Branding encompasses more than I’d previously really thought about, both in a business and technology senses.
It’s more of a ‘Pick and Mix’ affair than ‘small, medium or large’
Specification and scope is vitally important.
Therefore, branding should be treated as a proper project in its own right, with requirements, specification, design and testing phases.

Continue reading “Pimp my SharePoint Part II – Beyond Just Colours” →

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