SharePoint Power Hour Episode 76: Filter Web Parts

hi everyone welcome to SharePoint power our this is our weekly show that we do Wednesdays at 11:00 central I'm Laura Rogers and this is my team at Rackspace hosting we're all SharePoint consultants so today's topic is going to be the SharePoint office 365 Enterprise filter webparts so um I will go ahead before we get started with today's topic we'll all go through and introduce ourselves so um let's see we'll go will let all you guys introduce yourselves first and then I'll give a brief introduction and then get into my demos so let's see Joelle then Ryan and Tavis and we'll see if any other guys pop in - alrighty well hello everyone I am Joelle Farley can you guys hear me okay just making sure you guys okay I just switched my mic over someone to make sure I am - well Farley I am based out of Atlanta Georgia I'm on the business solutions team as well I am a SharePoint consultant and I worked with SharePoint for about 6 or 7 years now and I use filter webparts all the time so pay attention it's worthwhile hi everybody I am Ryan Keller I'm the branding guy on the SharePoint services team here in Rackspace been working with SharePoint for seven or eight years been doing branding for about four years now and I never use filter webparts so I'm interested to see how they work hello everyone my name is Tavis level and I'm the business intelligence developer on the business solutions team dealing with all things reporting and dashboard in help of it unmute myself all right so I'm Laura Rogers I've been I using SharePoint ten twelve years something like that I'm Microsoft MVP and filter webparts have been around since sharepoint 2007 enterprise and so they're really useful it's just that when you sort of see the filter webparts just this big long list of them when you are adding a web part to a page in SharePoint it doesn't you know it's not very obvious necessarily as to what they all do so I actually have a session that I do at conferences a lot called on the introduces you to the out-of-the-box web part so I have a few slides actually about the filter web parts and then I'm so I'm going to go through those and then I'm just gonna basically the whole rest of this power hour will be a demo of several of those and just a couple of real quick things about the way this Google hangout works we have a Q&A panel so if you're watching us on YouTube you have a little link a little yellow link that will take you over to the Google hangout and once you get to the Google hangout by default you're gonna have a little app called the showcase on the right that just by default it will just show you links that we shared but there's another app called Q&A so there's a little icon towards the top top right that looks like some little squares and that's what lets you flip between the apps so that's what lets you flip over to the Q&A app to be able to ask us questions because that's why we do it live so that we can be interactive with you our viewers so if you're watching why feel free to try it out and just say hello in that Q&A window and make sure you can find that and um I'll go ahead and share my screen and get started let's see let's not have your faces on the screen that I'm sharing okay so now you should be able to see just my my background on it I'll go ahead and my slides alright you guys um not if you can see my slide okay thanks alrighty so um this is a list of what the out of the box just filter web parts look like when you were on a page in SharePoint adding a web part just a little quick side note about web parts is that we actually did a whole other power hour and at some point in the past few months about just web part settings and you know just all the different settings that exist just in my parts in general so we had that whole other one that you can reference maybe well maybe one of you guys can find that and stick the link in the little showcase app to get a chance so this is what your list of filter web parts looks like the apply filters choice filter current user filter date filter page field filter so I'll go ahead and I usually don't have time to do this in the session when I'm talking about all that all the box web parts but I'll go ahead and briefly just describe each one of these and then I'll go ahead and when I do my demo I'll I'll be able to demo just a handful of them so apply filters I'm not gonna do that one first because it it doesn't really work alone so I'm gonna go through all the other ones I'm going to talk about apply filters last so choice filter is just the concept of having a sort of a drop-down box of choices so all these filter web parts and they're going to be connected to something else sending information to something else so the choice filter is giving you a drop-down to pick an item from a list current user filter just is gonna know current information about the currently logged in user and SharePoint or office 365 the date filter looks like a little date picker like you would see like the picker control in in any you know form and SharePoint and then the page fill field filter uses a field if you're on and just an aspx page like a page in that your site pages library or pages library in SharePoint it can look at the information in a field in that page query stream URL filter this one baffled me for years because I am NOT a developer and didn't know anything about what a query string was so a query string is when you're looking at a URL if you see like a little question mark and in your URL and some information after the question mark that's the query string so your URL itself can is sending information to the page or on to show you more specific set of information SharePoint list filter is more dynamic it's similar to the choice filter so choice is just some hard-coded choices and the SharePoint list filter is actually going to refer to a specific SharePoint list where you can pick one of your choices from that list sequel server now services that's going to connect to a that's a--that's a Tavis thing right it's going to connect to if you have a your data in one of those cubes cube there you go so I'm pretty sure that there's a good bit of behind the scenes set up that would need to happen for that filter to work you'd have to have a connection in the first place I believe so I have actually never used that one and then the text filter is you're simply typing in some information so let's just talk a little bit in my other slides about how these work alright so a little bit more information these are included with SharePoint Enterprise at least III with office 365 they require connections webpart connections to other web parts to filter data to work they don't do anything if you put one on a page by itself the provider web part is the one that sends data to the consumer web part that's what sure when you set up your web part connection you tell it whether it's sending data or receiving data and again this is from 2007 2010 2013 and office 365 so here's an example a screen shot of using a current user filter web part this is very cool so our current user filter is not going to show on the screen and users are not going to see it but what it does is it allows you to pick a field about the currently logged in user so think about how you have your Active Directory synchronization and how you have your whole user profile that exists in SharePoint and all those fields that exists first-name lastname Department I don't know a city state just all that all those different fields that have information about that person those those are going to be available to pick one of those fields so for example I have a department field that's coming from Active Directory to say what Department the currently logged in user is on and that's what that web part is storing Patrick says do you need to be using a web part page yes there well there's no other way to well I guess you're asking about a web part page compared to like a wiki page or republishing page or something you can do connections with all those other parts of types of pages so does it have to be a web part page it's just that with wiki pages these are very clunky and they will randomly disappear so I like web part page is better just in general but you don't have to so it stores the information about the currently logged in user and then I've created three different webpart connections to all these other web parts so it's sending values to a contoso department field that I have it's a site column that's actually got a department name for that's associated with every file and a department name associated with every task and a department make name with every promoted link and it's actually oops and it's actually sending that information about that logging users department behind the scenes to all those webparts so therefore when the person goes to look at the page they will automatically just see the stuff that's filtered to you know for them this is not security this is just simply filtering just like a filtered view it's just filtering information and that's just one really you know a basic really common example of what you can do with with the current user filter web part as long as the data has the exact same you know verbage so infant it can't say Information Technology or IT or be spelled in different ways so it has to have the exact same value for it to match up alright so that was all that was all I had for slides so I'll go ahead and get into my demo here ok so this is the this is that exact same site that I was showing you so I'll go ahead and show you now this is a wiki page so this is under you know site pages slash home just on a team site just the default home page you would get so the tricky thing about putting a filter web part on a wiki page as opposed to a web part page is that look at it over here it looks like just this almost invisible little rectangle here so there's not much to it it's you can't even hardly tell it's there and you can't hardly tell how that you can get to it and do anything with it so what I usually do is there's a little sort of it's a little workaround to this bugginess is I go hit edit web part just on some other web part Frank Frank's asking me if I can make my screen larger oh let me see maybe I can zoom in how's that how's maybe that'll help alright so I hit edit web part on another web part and look at that now all of a sudden my current user filter is showing here so now I can go hit ed what edit web part on there and now it will show up so you can see here that by default the current user filter web part just shows the name of the currently logged in user like that but again you can pick from all these different fields that you have from you know from that user profile so title like you know like their job title their email address anything like that so if you have a value that you need to be able to filter by in a in a list that's not you know for example you have like a people filled in people fields if you do a filter on a SharePoint list or library by a people field you can say like created by is equal to me modified is equal to me and you can use me and brackets so that people feel will automatically look at whoever's logged in and just match that up and show that person things that are pertaining to them but if you don't have a people field or if you have just some other data like the person's email address so if I just have email addresses in some column and I needed that to somehow match up with the logged in person's email address that's where I could use email here so whatever value I pick in here that is the value that it's sending to the other webparts so like when I go to when I go to my I'll show you my promoted links list over here so I'm going to go click on that just save my I don't really make any changes I'm gonna go to my promoted links list and show you that my all promoted links see I had this column that I had added called contoso Department so that is a and I'll go edit this item and show you that this is a drop-down box it's actually a lookup to a main list of departments or actually no I think it's just a choice box it's not a lookup because it's just storing that as the actual words information technology it just has text in a drop-down so this exact same field was added to the task list in the document list and all the seeing those same exact on the same page so then when I created my I'll go delete one of these webpart connections and show you how to recreate it so I'll go remove my filter remove my connection alright so when I when I'm creating a webpart connection I can start from the provider web park or I can start from the consumer web part usually just starting either way will work fine so go ahead and start it current user filter every now and then right Joelle guys you'll come across one where it makes more sense some going to go one specific way as opposed to the other but yeah usually doesn't matter so I'll say I'm going to say connections sim filter value too and I'm gonna say send it to policies so then I'm gonna say get my filter value they should just put filter value as the default here all these years I don't know why parameters been the default because that's much more rarely used and now this is where I have to match it up so the provider field name that's just my current user filter the data is the department though so I just have to remember the Department of the current user it matches with what in this list so it's going to be my contoso department feel library list library whatever so now it immediately sees that I'm in the IT department and it sends it to here now how can you tell when you're testing this what the value is that's being stored in that current user filter so I actually wrote a blog post about this is that it's called testing the current user filter but I'm going to I'll go ahead and demonstrate this real quick to I probably already have a page full test so test3 alright so I'll go ahead and just insert web part and go to my filters here and go to current user filter and then insert another web part and I'll insert the one called text filter so this will actually let me I can connect these two so I can visually look at what is in the current user filter in my text filter so I'm actually going to get my default value and the text filter from the current user filter and look at that it automatically just shows me because remember by default the current user filter has just the login name see the current user name like this so it immediately put that login name in the text filter so that women on set this up and I'm testing it I want to make sure that it works so I'll know exactly what its passing to the another web part I can try that so like if I try counting here and click ok actually I need to go refresh the page because it's still showing that cached information but now ok now I know that account name is domain slash user name so does that make sense so that's how you can actually see what's in that filter when you're using it I'll go ahead and show you let's see go at the same little test page here and add a few more of these other ones filters I'll show you what the the apply filters button that I mentioned earlier is basically gives them a button instead of them making a choice and it automatically filtering the other thing it just gives them a button to click so I make a choice and then it gives me a button it says to apply my filter and I can also save my favorite filters in there as well it's pretty cool Jack says as you were using it here I see it being more useful in a page with multiple lists I was trying to understand how this was better than sorting a column on a single list thank you alright Jack awesome and then again if it's if it's something other than just the currently logged name user like their name or who they are if it's like their department that's really the only way to filter list like that on some other value like I wrote another blog post about just showing like a weather information in a web part and I was actually using the zip code of the currently logged in user using the current user filter and passing that zip code to the weather web parts so that it wouldn't know which zip code to show so that's another example of using another field of the currently logged in user that's a really old blog post that's from like you know like three years ago or so but it still applies all right so I'll go ahead and put the choice filter on here um Mike I hate wiki pages so much you know what I don't want to use a wiki page I'm gonna go to my site contents and wiki pages drive me nuts so I can do my little shortcut of doing a webpart page by just going to my site pages library and just clicking webpart page like that we did a whole last week right right hand didn't you do a whole thing about publishing pages and different pages and I'm just okay I don't know if you feel the same way that I feel about wiki pages all right I'm going to add a choice filter and then I'm going to put another one over here and I'm gonna put the date filter I'm gonna show you what just some of the options are in these and then I'll put a I'm going to do the page fill filter in a minute and then do the query string in a minute SharePoint list filter and then um kind of already showed you the text but I'll show you these three you know main difference is gonna be what's the difference between a choice filter and a SharePoint list filter so with a choice I'm just typing them in this box and in the settings over here on the right see so I can say like um like these are departments like IT and or oh wait watch citizen for me you can do values and descriptions so like if my value is T in my description his information technology okay and then I might have like an abbreviation so I can do just values versus descriptions so like HR and then like Human Resources I don't have to do values and description so that it lets me do that okay and then I had some Advanced Options sometimes after you've created your connection with these filter webparts all this stuff will be grayed out and locked down it just means that you have to go remove your connection before it'll let you change some of the settings so I can go control the width maybe I don't want it to take up the width of the entire page and I can even make it required if I want to or if I want it to be empty or allow multiple selections so there's a lot of little cool little options in there so and just for testing these again I can use my tax filter webpart to just simply show the value that's being passed from one of these other webparts so I can say like get default value from and I'll just put my choice filter here all right so now whatever I pick in my choice filter will show it looks like I didn't make it wide enough I typed a hundred in there but that's not it looks kind of funky all crammed in there like that so I'll make it wider and I can say show MP etc all right so now when I am a stop editing it says it's not connected let's see what it does so this is what it looks like so when I chose for it to allow it to shows an empty option but it doesn't really it doesn't visually look like a drop-down box but it's the same concept it's letting me pick something so I'm picking an apartment and click OK and then you can see that the value that that's going to be passing to some other web part or a list or whatever I have on the page is just that the value that I defined so like if I own ethic I pick HR Human Resources it should send HR it didn't refresh it but that's the value that it's sending probably if I had my little let's see if my little apply filter button will help to do that I'll show you what that looks like all right so I filter and I'll move that up okay so now I'll say human resources which should show as who where's my apply filter interesting it's not showing there your try and refreshing odd let's see what it does it's not even it's not even not sending it now at all see so apply filters let's see if I actually have to do anything for it to work now it just says apply filters and it uh okay that's very interesting maybe apply filters it just doesn't work in this situation I'm not sure I hardly ever use it because usually I just want it to immediately just send that data when someone picks it so I don't usually put it on the page but that's very odd that it just completely would not show here you guys feel free to chime in if you've ever seen that happen I always have to have something that I demo in these things that just doesn't do what you'd expect it to do see apply filters doesn't have connections it's just you put it on the page and it simply works it's probably confused because there are so many filter webparts on this page so let me try that let me try removing a couple of these because I think that maybe it's just looking for a filter web part to be able to send information from yeah yeah okay so let's see no it didn't it still didn't show it but at least my my filters being passed huh let's see Deborah says Laura if you have time can you show how to use this displaying a large preview pane to show documents example Curie filter on a document number or a library content then once selected show a large preview window of the document I kind of did that with Excel services a couple of power hours ago where I had put the Excel Web Access web part on a page and then you click between different spreadsheets and it shows it in that web part but I'll see if I can do something like that I that the problem in Deborah is that I don't have Office Web Apps on my VM and this is my VM so I'm not sure if I'd be able to finagle that one we can definitely kind of try to delve into some stuff there alright so let me go back to my little test page and refresh it and show you some of these other settings and then I'll show you that I actually have a sort of example little scenario to show you how the page fill filled filter works so I'll go ahead and edit page and get rid so let's see get rid of this connection I just have a feeling that that's why I feel filters one is just not working because I don't have like a list or something on here that it's supposed to be sending data to okay so that was a choice one let's go look at how the date filter works and then I'll put a an actual list of something on a page so let's see um just put some documents so everything's gonna have a date right there's nothing in that library it's not the library that has nothing in it I'll put policies you're a little fake company policies alright so date filter what are some settings in here alrighty it has do you want a default value so you can put a specific date or you can say offset from today so that's pretty cool how you can say offset by I'll just say one day or something like that and then it's after or before so I'll say maybe I want to just show stuff from yesterday by default or have a specific date in there by default so or I can say probably 0 days and then it would just show today and then my Advanced Options are going to be is it required or not so I'll go ahead and save that change and then I'm going to send my filter value to policies and okay my filter value from and then I have to pick a date field so it's not gonna automatically only show me date fields so I need to know you know a date a specific date field to pick so I'll just say modified so by default now it's showing the amount of things that were modified on that particular day and let's see if I can make it so since I don't I don't really need to do the visual thing where I was showing it in the text filter like I did for the other one because I'm just I'm seeing it right here on the page anyway so let's go ahead and I'm gonna go to my policies library I'm gonna find some specific date that I can um you know just kind of go see what dates exist in this thing um modified March nights so I have one that was fairly recently modified March night alright okay so instead of using the default I'm just gonna change it to March 9th and then then go I didn't do it all right but look there's my apply filters button it's magical so if I wanted it to remember that I put three nine in here I could check the box I guess it just only shows when it's applicable and it just knows when it's applicable or not so now put I changed it to three nine and then I click apply so I would probably want to put the apply filters webpart below the one that I'm clicking on so that the it would make sense to end-users but that's where that will send that value and let's try I wonder if we could do like a range I wonder if that would work now just keep in mind when you're doing a date filter like that that out of the box you have what's called metadata navigation with some filtering options that's in there already so this isn't something where you have to reinvent the wheel necessarily so let's see I think this is an exact date though so think a lot of people a lot of questions I get would be how how can I put a webpart on here that would send like you know where you can say it's greater than this or something like that but with this the way this connection is done on this page this is just going to show me things that were modified on that date there's no like this is the beginning date and this other thing is the end date so just kind of something to note but you could put like you know put a webpart on it on your team page that says project documents edited today and of course the thing about that is if it did you could do a default of modified is equal to today but if you have this date filter on a page then people would quickly have an interactive way where they could go just change that to another date but then again you still have your your columns you're just columns in your lists and libraries that have dates that you can quickly sort and filter by too so just kind of keep all those little out-of-the-box things in mind that's why I haven't used this date filter webpart that much just because there's so many out-of-the-box ways that kind of already do that um let's see all right yeah most anybody else have questions let me know um see ya Debra I'm gonna try and see if I can get to that but I'm just not sure all right now I'll show you thee I showed you the choice filter so I'll get rid of that one I'm going to show you the lookup one so I think I have a list of departments let me go see what I'm going to use for my lookups so I know so departments no see this is all just my my test stuff that I have for my class and I teach and stuff like that so I'm just looking for something good to use for just something to do a lookup of project phase phases yeah sure those shortly don't make sense for project phase names but I'm going to use that as my lookup for drop down that I'm gonna do on my page all right so go back to to test for and refresh that and this time I'm going to get rid of my date filter and put the lookup filter on here I think yeah I deleted it alright alright so now I have project phases there oh wait no I didn't mean to put project phases on there I meant to put a look-up on there alright my brain alright SharePoint list filter all right so it's gonna be similar to when you're creating a lookup field you pick a SharePoint list using this little button and then I need to go to find so here's project phases that's the list I need insert and then look at that I get to pick a specific view if I want so that's kind of nice so I can pick if I have a specific filtered view that would be a good way of showing only those particular filter and items ooh I'm starting to get ideas all right so I have a value field so I need to have a value to be able for them to pick from and then I can have a description field if I want to so my value is number of hours which I think I really want my value to be like the name of the project phase let's see I'm gonna I'm just gonna click ok and see what it does that's very odd though that it doesn't have just the title as a value have you guys ever used this one Joell anybody project phases say project phase is the title field and then I have a number of items and project phase was just yeah the title field renamed so I'm going to create another one called phase name and just to see if maybe this is a bug alright so then I'll go here quickly go to quick edit and then just copy those I mean not go backwards there and then we'll see if that works that's I swear constantly finding little weird things like that or not I was like okay alright um back over there okay now sure point list filter I think this is actually starting to ring a bell like I think that I've seen it do this before that yep see it just doesn't like the title field that's what it is so as long as it's not the title field you can use that as your whatever value and remember the value is what it's stored and what it's sending to the other web part and the description is just the thing that they're seeing so again you can have the value store something else all right so I'm gonna go click OK and then so now I have my whatever's set up in here and I'll say I'm gonna send my default value to my text filter so I can see what I pick so let's go see what that looks like so here are my options it looks just like the the other one except it's not sending a default value that's fine I'm not surprised so what I'm gonna do is I want to have a library that's got a lookup to that list of project phases and that way when I pick a project phase it will automatically show me the matching items right so that would that would kind of be the best scenario where you would do something like that so not not project phases but project files so project files and make sure that the project files actually has look up field over to project phases and then you would see how those all kind of match up so it doesn't exist yet I'm gonna go ahead and throw that in here so you look up just making sense okay please alright and then I'll say project phases and in this column phase name is the one that I just created so that's what they'll be able to pick from and then I just need to go into this library and put a few values in these like that alright and then who cares what's doing all those folders um alright so now I've got the relationship and I've got things that are you know kind of talk into each other you know this test for page I'm getting tired of doing this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go pin this to my quick launch real quick so if I go hit I'm on test for page I'm gonna hit edit links I'm going to take test for and just drag it over here into my navigation and click Save so now I can just quickly go to it each time alright so instead of putting my policies on the page I'm going to put that let library that's going to have the relationship in it so that should be a better scenario that you would use for something like this such a for something that actually has a relationship so I'll go project files and then get filter value from and I'll say SharePoint list filter and then now my project phase that I'm picking in the provider web part is going to match up with what so it should be my project phase I hate the way these are not in any kind of order times time it is now let's see what happens apply filters whoo-hoo so that makes sense so what I did was I allowed it to and it's letting me pick something and then whatever value I have it's sending that value as a filter to this other list I wonder if I could receive a filter get default value from you know be really cool Joelle if you could get a default value from like a query string or something and then somehow have it dynamically filtered because because it lets you do that filter like different views that lets you filter it by a specific view of the nice if you could that's what people ask for all the time is having like a cascading drop-down so I just started getting ideas but yeah it's probably too far-fetched all right so I'm going to show you the page field filter next so I showed you the choice in the apply filters and the SharePoint list and text filter date filter now I'll show you the page field filter because it's a little more obscure and it's a little more you know you kind of have to see it to really understand what it does so I'm going to go to my Human Resources site and what I have is I have a whole bunch of benefit documents I have a like medical vision and dental I have some benefits and I have a whole bunch of documents and then I have each document is actually using a look of it associate associated with a specific benefit so like when I go to benefit documents see I can see it's got a lookup field to the name of the benefit each benefit is a page and a pages library medical vision and dental so when I click on medical I created this little page and I've got some benefit documents I've got a little you know a pretty little link here that's a from a promoted links list and I've got a bunch of just text about just verbage about our medical benefits at our company and even contact information so what this doing is doing is it's using a page field to see what to filter the information by so when I show you how this works you're probably going to think that a query string would be more efficient so I'll show you how it works and then I'll show you how we could probably do it better with accretion so um I have all these different lists so benefit links benefit documents and benefit contacts all have this lookup so what does the lookup going to it is going to benefit yet benefit that is actually a lookup to the site pages so all my been each benefit is a page and a pages library so when I'm doing a lookup in all these other lists and libraries it's just going to cite pages and looking at the title the name of the benefit so then in my pages library site pages see here are my different dental vision and medical benefits and I can go look at the benefit name is an L so and extra so I did I put it in the title and then I also put benefit name in here because um I think it was getting another one of those things where it didn't like that field the filter webparts didn't like using the title field for some reason so just kind of keep that in mind so medical I'll go edit properties so basically it's got the title just the name of the file and then benefit name is the one that I added in there and I called it medical and then I also made the title of it the same thing so basically I've got like it got it in like three different places so page field filter is gonna look at a field on whatever current page you're on so a field is going to be like name title benefit name some field or any other field that you've added to the page the site pages or pages library itself so when I go to I'll go to dental I haven't built this out one yet and I'll go ahead and build that out so I'll go insert my filter web part my page field filter and then when I then I'll go insert kind of a couple of the other ones like benefit documents and stuff mmm-hmm and go alright and then I'll put um I'll just do that one for now so remember the trick if you got this little gray box and you can't get to the settings you just open up the settings for some other web part and then this one magically lights up so I know it's weird alright so which page field are we using so that's why I have to pick that from this list so remember how I said the title field didn't work see there's no title field here it's just benefit name it didn't even have the name of the file either so that's why I had to create this extra field called benefit name I know it's really dumb so and I can do I want to send empty if there's no value send only the first value if I have multiple etc so I picked my benefit name as the page field and then I'll go back into edit edit the page I'm still editing the page alright and then I need to create my connection so I'll say send filter value to benefit documents and then this particular page is called dental so it should automatically when I do this show me the dental documents so let's see it's gonna be benefit alright now it did it but you just can't tell so I'll go ahead and apply that change and I'm going to put my benefit column here so you can see that it that it did it come on so we write benefit there that's the cool thing about the filter webparts is that you don't have to be looking at the column that you're filtering filtering by that's actually kind of nice so dental did it just mom I hate wiki pages so much it yet just wiped out the entire page nice real nice as any would say in American crisps Christmas vacation that's real nice floor page field filter let's practice this again let's see if it did it insert it um I'll do they benefit documents again see it said it says benefit documents - so it's it's as if it still has one on there somewhere Ryan is this something that you see look I store the wrong one is this something you see like in branding that it's is it hidden somewhere on the page when that happens like where is it I don't know if if wiki pages keep the web parts if they're closed or whatever says - on it so it makes it makes me think that it's in there might be you could always do that you know you they contents equals one oh yeah maybe I'll try that in a minute document is - and I'm gonna pick my filter value this is fine practice benefit so what I was trying to do is I was trying to just show the benefit column here um just to show you that so it is being filtered now I'm on my dental dental page and it's automatically showing me the dental documents and then I would add those other ones like on here I had um benefit links is a promoted links list that also has up to my little all promoted links it also has a drop-down box in here that lets them pick a benefit seeing right here so that's you know exactly the same as the one I showed you in the library minute ago so that's where those links are coming from and that's how that was built out but you still you have to build one page and then if you had SharePoint designer you could actually like copy and then paste a couple of times to create the other pages but then um and then you would just whatever you had in that benefit name field it would automatically you know show the right information but you still it makes you create all these multiple pages so that's the when we get to the concept of a query string is where you have information that you're sending from the URL that you're on to be able to automatically just just have one page and show it all the proper information so that's where we get to let's see music says it's always comforting to see you experts have issues - yeah so um I'll go ahead and show you an example and you might you guys might have noticed this if you ever if you watch the little Newhart onboarding little demo that I did but I'll show you it's this concept of a sort of dashboard where you can have information about one thing being sent to the dashboard so I'm going to go ahead and build out a page like that and show you how the query string works so I'll go ahead and say um I really just want to create a page and we go to my site contents and go to my oh this is not doesn't have the publishing features enabled so it doesn't have any pages in here I think I turned off the wiki page home page I'm gonna go this other one you see site pages there we go I'm just doing in here so I'll do a web part page test I think about like having project information or having person information or just any situation where you need to have one page that displays a bunch of related things about some central item so I'll have like this one is going to be the new hire list so I want to show information about a new hire and then I want to show maybe some related other lists that we might have having to do with maybe tasks that are being assigned around a specific workflow so and something that I've pointed out in the past that's just a little weird buggy thing with a task list and that little timeline that puts on there is that it doesn't let you out of the box with a when we put the view looks like that with a task list it doesn't let you do webpart connections at least if you create one it doesn't work so I just had to create a view that uses a style in the view settings that's not the default style just any of those other styles it's weird so then I did that and I create I had created that view previously and so now it not will let me create a connection to it so what I want to do is I want to this page to show one new hire and I want to show all the related information to that new hire so this ID is going to be central to what I'm going to be using so my new hire lookup is a lookup field I have over in this task list and when I set up this lookup field i additionally brought over the ID because the ID is that unique thing that i that it's going to let me to viet let me create that connection on the best way so when i created the new hire of this lookup field I just additionally checked the box next to ID all right so and that's in the tasks list that's the things that are related to this one you know central person that we're going to show on this page alright so I'm gonna say I just I can just give my query string whatever name that I want to give it so I'm gonna call it um higher so the word higher is what's going to be after the question mark when we're doing the query in the query stream so it's going to stay higher equals something and that's gonna be an ID so I'm going to call it higher and then I'm just gonna and just for fun just I can change the title I can just say higher i if i want just so when I'm looking at it I'll remember you just for my reference because remember no one's gonna see the filter webparts so then I want to show one new hire in here and Deborah you were talking about you know looking at the concept of showing detailed information about a document or something like at what I can do one little style that exists is called boxed and it will show whatever fields you pick as like more like a detail of you in a box as opposed to like a big list of items so I'm gonna say I just want to show one new hire I'm just going to show the one that I'm going to be sending from the filter so this one is showing Todd by default and then I want to then the tasks are fun so the next thing to do is to create the the connection so send filter value to and I'll say new hire list so whichever ID like higher equals something that's what I'm gonna have this one is going to show get filter values from does a deal alright so the query string is sending it to the ID of the new hire all right and then right now I don't have a value of my career stream yet and then this one's going to get filter values from the hire ID also and that one's gonna get remember that one that was the new hire lookup : ib alright so now let's try this and we did a whole other power hour by the way on this concept of quick steps that I'm about to show you so let's see higher equals to see maybe Todd was hiring number two let me see let's try three well say Jennifer Mason is hire three and look at that it's got tasks associated with gender Mason Jeffrey Masson so that's how I can you know they're varying ways that you're going to be sending people to this page but again you don't have to create a page for each new hire we have a list of project that we that we have that we work on a SharePoint consultants and I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen will quit while I talk for a minute we have a list of projects that we share we have them categorized by like you know programming projects branding projects server admin projects well we don't need to create a separate page for each type of project to have a you know a dashboard for those people to look at we can just create one page and say send a filter you know crew string value to it saying like project type equals death or something like that and then that way you're going to one page and you're just seeing those related items so sort of the one way to get people to a page like this is I'll go ahead and share my screen one more time and I think I've shown this probably in a couple of different demos but again it's that concept of a quick step so when I go home and I click on a one of my little test items in here and I go to dashboard I actually have it built in so it says higher equals 10 so the person that I clicked on was ID number 10 and it automatically takes them to this dashboard that I create this is a different one that I had created like in another demo but it's the same concept that's showing all the items around that one so again our whole power our about quick steps slash custom actions would take you to that to learn how to do that that's in SharePoint designer that you have to do that little linkage and then just this whole new higher concept I did like a series of six or seven videos that are also power hours that if you go look at so alright so Deborah um did not get to show you Diane I wouldn't been able I wouldn't have been able to do that anyways ever since I don't have Office Web Apps on my little demo environment here but just go go take a look at that one we did with the Excel Web Access web part that lets you do that with Excel but I'm not sure just off the top of my head how you would do that with a word document Joelle or anybody if y'all don't have you've done that with a entire doc before um the only thing I've done is just the document preview you can kinda tap into that with a search result so apart but it's not gonna like just show it on a page so I'd have to think about that a little bit more okay so that was just an overview of several of the filter webparts hopefully that was helpful we have a couple more minutes where you guys can ask us any more questions but just in general we have some announcements we have the let's see the evolution the sharepoint evolution conference in london that I'll be at the week of April 18th I'll be speaking there we have a night coming up Microsoft tonight giant conference it's gonna be the first week of May I'll be there going there like May 2nd all uh let's see Todd and I are doing a session all day unfortunately yeah you should do a session where those pre day sessions with him so I'll be there that Sunday and then Joelle and Ryan you guys are gonna be there and maybe we'll do some kind of Power Hour e thing while we're there and that would be awesome so we'll see if we can figure something out I don't know when my other session is that I'm presenting there so once I find that out we'll have to figure out make sure it doesn't collide you know doesn't conflict with Power Hour anything like I'm just not sure so um all right um I don't know what we're doing next week on Power Hour but I'm sure we'll figure it out one of you guys oh I'll be on spring break so all right I guess nobody else has any questions that was fun um I will see you guys next week hopefully we'll have a demo and I'll put it up on our YouTube sharepoint re X channel you can click on videos and then you can click on events and the little drop down and that's how you can see things that are upcoming and you know these things that we've broadcast over and out

Channel: SharePoint at Rackspace

Views: 6,339

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Keywords: HOA

Id: Bgk-oP-_M9c

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2015