FAQ - Web Part Connections
SharePoint allows you to connect together web parts
in order to pass data between them.
You can use this feature to display data from one
web part in another web part or filter the data in a web part
depending on the information passed in.
Consult SharePoints online help or
this page for more information.
The PivotPoint Web Part is a Filter Consumer - meaning
that it will take information provided to it and filter the display
accordingly. For example you could pass in a filter of "High" and
it will show only High priority records.
You can configure how the PivotPoint Web Part uses these filter
values using the Filter configuration toolpart.
-
How do I setup a web part connection?
This example is going to be based around a sales list that
contains Date, Product, Price and Product.
As we don't want to develop any
custom filter providers we are going to have a separate list
containing the Products for sale and we will add a Product
Lookup field to the Sales list. In this way we can
use the Product list to filter the Sales Cross Tab.
On this page we have added a PivotPoint Web Part web part to
display a summary of our Sales list and the Product list. We have modified
the Product view to only display the title.
Next we will setup the filter -
- Select Site Actions >
Edit Page
- Select the web parts
Edit menu
- Select Connections
then Filter using WSS v2 interface and choose the
Products web part
Note - The way web part connections
work has changed between WSS v2 and WSS v3. Some web parts
such as SharePoint's built in List web parts only support
the old method. PivotPoint can use both methods and in this
example the new "Get Filter Values from" method is disabled
as no web parts on this page support this method.
- Select the Title column from
the Products list
- Select the column that
contains matching information in the Sale list - in this case
Product
- Select Next and exit
the page Edit mode.
- Now you can filter the
Cross Tab to only include sales for the product selected. For
example clicking on the radio button next to "Bottle-o-matic"
will show the sales for that product only :-
- I need to filter by a Choice field, how can I do this?
If you need to filter by a value that isn't in a lookup list
(e.g. Priority - High/Med/Low) then you will need to create a custom
filter provider web part.
The easiest way to do this (although you will still need HTML
skills) is to add a Form Web Part to the page and then use the
Source Editor to write HTML to display a list of the values you wish
to filter by using a Select list or Radio Button list. Then connect
the web parts in the usual manner.
For example this HTML displays a drop down list showing Priority
that you could use in a Form Web Part to filter a task list.
<div>
<select name="Priority" onchange="javascript:_SFSUBMIT_">
<option value="(1) High">(1) High</option>
<option value="(2) Normal">(2) Normal</option>
<option value="(3) Low">(3) Low</option>
</select>
</div>
Tips
-
You can use
the same techniques to supply Filters to SharePoints own lists.
-
Many web
parts can accept or provide multiple filters. In the example
shown above you could supply a Contractor filter to both a
PivotPoint Web Part web part and a task list - experiment to see
what's possible!
-
MOSS 2007
includes several web parts to assist in filtering - check the
online documentation.
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