Hey everyone,

Sorry to be so lax in my postings. I was really busy getting ready for PDC and now Beta1 for Office looms somewhere on the horizon. Please check out Rob Mauceri's blog on our plans moving forward.

Additionally, check out this article on MSDN which documents the DDWRT (data driven web runtime) functions available in the DataViewWebPart. This was done with a lot of work from Serge Van Den Oever as well as our dev team.

Thanks!
-John

Hi,

I was just asked a great question: "How do I create a hyperlink when using a Lookup field that points to the item for that lookup field..."

This is not completely straightforward, so bare with me. In this example, I am using the Announcements list and the Contacts list. In the Announcements list I created a lookup field the LastName value in the Contacts list and have created a few announcements with the LastName value in them.

1. I need to get the List Id of the Contacts list. You can use the web service for this, but I find it much easier to simply drag the Contacts list onto a new page in design view, switch to code view, and Find '@ID' and then grab the list ID (it is a GUID). Then I close that page without saving it.

2. Create a new page

3. insert a view of the Announcements list including the Lookup field 4. select the Lookup field data value 5. Insert > Hyperlink 6. type the following into the URL address field:

http://server/subsite/Lists/Contacts/dispform.aspx{ddwrt:URLLookup('{LIST-GUID-FOUND-IN-STEP-ONE}', 'lookup', string(@ID))}

(NOTE The nested {} around the GUID).

My URL looks like this:

{ddwrt:URLLookup('{BBD5C595-B540-4839-AAAF-7FB2555A0960}', 'lookup', string(@ID))}

7. Save the page

8. switch back to code view and find "mailto:"

9. Delete this. It is a bug that when your URL has an @ symbol in it, FrontPage adds the mailto: code...goofy, but should be fixed in the next release.

10. save the page again

11. Preview in the browser

12. click the Link

NOTICE: You should be directed to the dispform.aspx page and see the contact information.

I just came across Serge's Blog last night and wanted to link to it, but also wanted to get some feedback. I've been working on documenting all the DDWRT functions the come with the DataViewWebPart, when much to my surprise, Serge had already a good job of it himself.

http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2005/01/03/345535.aspx

I was hoping to get some feedback about whether this information is useful, high priority, necessary...any comments at all.

Thanks!

-John

I posted awhile ago about how to select unique values for tabular data views, but I have now received a few emails asking how to do it for drop-down lists. It is almost the exact same code, but apparently this is confusing enough to warrant a different post.

My code sample assumes you are using the default Announcements list on SharePoint and that the Title field is what you want to display.

First, browse out to your Announcements list (which you get by default when you create a SharePoint site), and add a few Announcements all with the same title (just for demonstrations sake :-))

Then...

1. Insert a Data View Web Part based on the Announcements list
2. Click Data..Style and change to the drop-down view style..OK
2. Probably best to switch to code view at this point
3. Find the code that looks like this:
<xsl:template name="dvt_1.body" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
            <xsl:param name="Rows"/>
            <xsl:param name="FirstRow"/>
            <xsl:param name="LastRow"/>
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
                <xsl:variable name="KeepItemsTogether" select="false()"/>
                <xsl:variable name="HideGroupDetail" select="false()"/>
                <xsl:variable name="GroupStyle" select="'auto'"/>
                <xsl:if test="(position() &gt;= $FirstRow and position() &lt;= $LastRow) or $KeepItemsTogether">
                    <xsl:if test="not($HideGroupDetail)" ddwrt:cf_ignore="1">
                        <option style="display:{$GroupStyle}">
                            <xsl:value-of select="@Title"/>
                        </option>
                    </xsl:if>
                </xsl:if>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:template>
4. Change that code to look like this:
<xsl:template name="dvt_1.body" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
            <xsl:param name="Rows"/>
            <xsl:param name="FirstRow"/>
            <xsl:param name="LastRow"/>
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
                <xsl:variable name="KeepItemsTogether" select="false()"/>
                <xsl:variable name="HideGroupDetail" select="false()"/>
                <xsl:variable name="GroupStyle" select="'auto'"/>

<!-- this next line is used to store the value we need to compare for uniqueness -->
                <xsl:variable name="uniqueTitle" select="@Title"/>
                <xsl:if test="(position() &gt;= $FirstRow and position() &lt;= $LastRow) or $KeepItemsTogether">
                    <xsl:if test="not($HideGroupDetail)" ddwrt:cf_ignore="1">
<!-- this next part is where we compare the variable created above to the current selection and if they are different, we write the value -->
        <xsl:if test="@ID=//Rows/Row[@Title=$uniqueTitle][1]/@ID">
                        <option style="display:{$GroupStyle}" value="{@Title}">
                            <xsl:value-of select="@Title"/>
                        </option></xsl:if>
                    </xsl:if>
                </xsl:if>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:template>
5. Save the page.  Notice that only the unique values are displayed.  You can use this code in any number of places in the XSLT (for example, inside a drop-down menu).

I have a Data View Web Part that displays the status of several different servers I maintain.  Basically, I am using a SharePoint list.  The List has a Title field which contains the name of each server and a multiple choice field that lets me set the status to "UP," "DOWN," or "CAUTION."

For each of these three statuses, I have a little gif image of a green arrow, red arrow and yellow circle respectively.  What I want to do is create a data view that has the name of the server and displays the arrow based on the what the status is. 

Here's how to do that.

1. Open the wss site in FrontPage 2003
2. Click Data..Insert Data View
3. Right click the SharePoint list that contains my data
4. Click "Show Data"
5. Select the Title field
6. Click "Insert Data View"
7. Since I only selected one field, I get a bulleted list. So I change this: by clicking on Data..Style > General tab and changing to Tabular view..OK
8. Place the Cursor next to one of the server names and add a new column to my view: Table > Insert > Rows and Columns
9. Place the Cursor inside a cell in this new column and insert my image
10. Insert > Picture from file
11. I type in the URL to the green.gif
12. Next to this image, I insert the red.gif and yellow.gif as well so each row of data now shows all three images
13. Select the green.gif image
14. Click on Data..Conditional Formatting
15. Click Create
16. Click Show Content...
17. I create a filter that says "Status == UP"..OK (now the green arrow only shows in rows where status is UP)
18. Repeat steps 13 through 17 for the other two gifs, setting the filter appropriately
19. Save the page

Using Conditional Formatting opens up a huge world of possibilities.  You can modify views by passing parameters via web part connections, you can format items conditionally, you can show data or hide data based on complex XPATH by clicking on the Advanced button in the filter dialog, and on and on.

I get asked this one a lot, and thought I had blogged it but it looks like I didn't.  The general user scenario is where you have a parent site (http://myserver) that contains a list of information that is relevant to a bunch of subsites (http://myserver/subsite) and you want to display the data from the parent inside the children.

For these steps, the server I am using is called: http://myserver, on this server is my subsite: http://myserver/subsite

1. Open this subsite in FrontPage
   1. Browse to http://myserver/subsite/default.aspx and click File > Edit in Microsoft FrontPage, or
   2. Launch FrontPage and click File > Open Site and type in this URL
2. Open the default.aspx page if it isn’t open already
3. Data..Insert Data View (this should launch the Data Source Catalog)
4. At the bottom of the Catalog, expand “XML Web Services”
5. Click “Add to catalog”
6. Type in this URL: http://myserver/_vti_bin/lists.asmx
7. Click “Connect now”
8. In the “Operation” drop-down, change the value to “GetListItems” method
9. Change the listName property to “Announcements” (without the quotes)
10. Click OK
11. Right click this data source and choose “Show Data” (should launch the Data View Details taskpane)
12. Select the fields you want to display
13. Place the Cursor in the page where you want to insert the Data View
14. Click “Insert Data View” from the taskpane
15. From the Data..Style menu, you can control the appearance, paging, toolbars, etc.
16. From the Data..Filter menu, you can add a filter for the data source
17. From the Data..Web Part Properties dialog, you can control the web part chrome
18. By going into code view, you can add the JavaScript to enable the drop-down menu items for editing the list items, if that’s what you want.  You can also use FrontPage’s design tools to create hyperlinks. For example:
    1. Select the title data value
    2. Insert > Hyperlink
    3. Create a hyperlink to the editform.aspx page
    4. Click on Parameters
    5. Add a parameter to the URL for the List ID number
    6. OK back to the page

That should allow you to click on the Title and edit that specific list item

All of the functionality is there, it’s just a matter of knowing how to add it.
I made these steps very long to be careful, but it really is quite easy.

Let me know if any of this needs further clarification.

-John

Windows SharePoint Services ships with some really powerful web services that allow users to access list and site information not available through other means.  FrontPage 2003 allows users to access these web services in a very straight forward manner, populating all of the query fields dynamically so that little or no knowledge of SOAP is required.

This example here describes how to use the Data View Web Part to access the lists.asmx web service to display the Attachments on list items in wss.  In order to make this as easy to describe as possible, I will use the Announcements list.

So, to start, I browse to the announcements list on my server: http://myserver/subsite/lists/announcements/forms/allitems.aspx and add a new announcement.  The title is 'foo' and I click to add an attachment which is called attachment.htm.  By default, I now have two announcements in my list, one with title "Welcome to Windows SharePoint Services..." and one with title "foo."  I open this site in FrontPage 2003 and create a new blank page on which to work.

1. Data..Insert Data View
2. In the Data Source Catalog, Right click Announcements > Show Data
3. In the Data View Details taskpane, select the Title and the Body and click "Insert Data View" (this should create a data view web part on your blank page displaying the Title and Body for the two announcements)
4. Data..Insert Data View
5. Expand the "XML Web Services" section of the Catalog
6. Click "Add to Catalog"
7. In the "Service Description Location" type: http://myserver/subsite/_vti_bin/lists.asmx
8. Click "Connect now"
9. Under "Operation" change to the "GetAttachmentCollection" method
10. Double click "listName" and set the value to "Announcements"..OK
11. Double click "listItemID" and set the value to '2' (without the quotes - this is the ID of the item that has the attachment from above, if you set this value to 1, step 14 will not work), check the box that "The value of this parameter can be set at runtime"..OK
12. Click OK to the Data Source Properties dialog
13. Right click this new data source in the Data Source Catalog > Show Data
14. You should see the path to your attachment load in the Data View Details tree
15. Place your cursor under the DVWP you inserted in step 3
16. Select the "Attachment" data value in the DVD tree and click "Insert Data View" (you should now have two data views on your page, one of the titles and body and one of the attachments)
17. Right click the Data Value to the Attachment and Format Items As > Hyperlink
18. Right click the first data view > Web Part Connections
19. Use the Connections wizard to create a connection which will pass the ID value from the first data view to the second
    1. PROVIDE DATA VALUES TO > NEXT
    2. CONNECT TO A WEB PART ON THIS PAGE > NEXT
    3. TARGET WEB PART: Lists on Subsite; TARGET ACTION: Modify web part using Parameters from > NEXT
    4. COLUMNS IN ANNOUNCEMENTS: ID; INPUTS TO LISTS: listItemID >NEXT (if you don't have listItemID, you forgot to check the box in step 11)
    5. CREATE A HYPERLINK ON TITLE and INDICATE CURRENT SELECTION USING: ID > NEXT
    6. FINISH
20. Save the Page and Preview in the Browser
21. Click on "Foo" and you will see the Link to its attachment.  Click the link and see the Attachment load in your browser.

I hope that this introduction to web services in SharePoint and FrontPage inspires you to check out all the other methods.  Let us know what problems you've solved by using these web services!

Thanks!

Hey there.  FrontPage shipped a View Style for the Data View Web Part that doesn't really do anything.  The style is the drop-down style.  What most people want from this style is the ability to fire connections from it, so I wrote a KB article about this.  That is still in draft state, but I've seen this question so many times, I felt I had to post it here as well.

Good luck!

1. Insert two Data Views of your data.

2. Select one of the Data Views, choose Style from the Data View Details taskpane.

3. Choose the drop-down box style from the list of styles, click OK.

4. Right click this Data View, choose Web Part connections.

5. Connect to the other Data View as you would normally.

6. Go into Code View.

7. Look for the <a target="_self"> code that looks similar to this (usually, it would be the first <a> tag in the page) and copy the entire block for the first XSL:ATTRIBUTE (see below):

<a target="_self">

<!-- NOTE: start copying here -->
<xsl:attribute xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="href"><xsl:variable name="cursel">dvt_curselkey={<xsl:value-of select="$CurrentRowKey"/>}</xsl:variable><xsl:variable xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="fields">@ID=<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ConnEncode(string(@ID))"/></xsl:variable>javascript:<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:GenFireConnection(concat('99d2bb39-f973-482c-a0ca-e49b56eae72d*',$fields),string($cursel))"></xsl:value-of></xsl:attribute>
<!-- NOTE: end copying here-->

<xsl:attribute name="style"><xsl:if test="$CurrentRowKey = $dvt_curselkey">font-weight: bold;</xsl:if></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="@Title"/>
</a>

8. Look for the code for the <option> tag.  It should be right above the <a> tag.

9. Paste in the section of code you copied above. 

10. Change the name="href" part to name="value".  At this point, you should have something like this:

<option style="display:{$GroupStyle}">
  <xsl:attribute xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="value"><xsl:variable name="cursel">dvt_curselkey={<xsl:value-of select="$CurrentRowKey"/>}</xsl:variable><xsl:variable xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="fields">@ID=<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ConnEncode(string(@ID))"/></xsl:variable>javascript:<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:GenFireConnection(concat('99d2bb39-f973-482c-a0ca-e49b56eae72d*',$fields),string($cursel))"></xsl:value-of></xsl:attribute>
  <a target="_self">
    <xsl:attribute xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="href"><xsl:variable name="cursel">dvt_curselkey={<xsl:value-of select="$CurrentRowKey"/>}</xsl:variable><xsl:variable xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="fields">@ID=<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ConnEncode(string(@ID))"/></xsl:variable>javascript:<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:GenFireConnection(concat('99d2bb39-f973-482c-a0ca-e49b56eae72d*',$fields),string($cursel))"></xsl:value-of></xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:attribute name="style"><xsl:if test="$CurrentRowKey = $dvt_curselkey">font-weight: bold;</xsl:if></xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:value-of select="@Title"/>
  </a>
</option>

11. Look for the <select> tag for the drop down.  It should look something like:

<select name="ID" size="1">

12. Add an onchange event handler for the tag, as follows:

<select name="ID" size="1" onchange="eval(this.options.value)">

Now when you change the value your drop-down, your connection should fire.