I’ve just updated the Salamander DataViewer web part to support connections to other web parts which provide an IWebPartField connection.
I’ve also updated the User Search and My Children web parts, part of our MIS Web Parts solution, to provide an IWebPartField connection. Here’s a screen shot of a simple connection where My Children is linked to the DataViewer.
This is likely going to be most useful for linking to external systems holding information about your pupils and staff.
One of my existing customers is currently trialling the Data Viewer Web Part in order to display the timetable from Facility CMIS. He was quite happy writing the SQL to retrieve it from the database, but wanted a quick and easy way to display it. He was delighted with how simple it was to retrieve the information for the logged in pupil by using a parameterised query with the pupil’s Student ID was is stored in Active Directory.
For the staff though, he wanted them to be able to display a selected pupil’s timetable and suggested using the MOSS filter webparts. I hadn’t actually come across these before so did some investigation and decided it would be nice if the Data Viewer could be connected to them, and it didn’t look too difficult. In the end it took longer than anticipated due to where in the web part lifecyle the connection was made, and how that interacted with the sorting and paging functionality, but now the Data Viewer Web Part can be connected to the MOSS filter web parts. The value from a filter web part can now be used in the parameterised SQL query, just like Active Directory attributes can.
I had interest in the Data Viewer Web Part from a school who wanted to list the videos stored in their media server within their SharePoint portal. Their media server didn’t have any native way of doing this, but they were familiar with the database structure so were interested in seeing if the web part could help them.
They really wanted to be able to display a link so that the users could click on it and then see the appropriate video. I thought that this sounded like a good idea and added a column formatting option so that a column could be turned into a hyperlink, optionally displaying another column as the hyperlink text. This worked perfectly for them and they are now using it to surface their videos in SharePoint.
The column formatting option only currently supports converting into hyperlinks and hiding a column (if being used for the text in the hyperlink), but I could easily extend it to support other types of formatting. However, most formatting could be done in the SQL statement already by using the built in SQL formatting.
One of my customers asked if I could help him with displaying House Points in SharePoint. The school had already decided that they wanted a House Point system, in the network managers words, like Harry Potter, and the network manager had figured out a way of assigning them by modifying the behaviour events in CMIS to have positive or negative points. What he needed from me was a query to retrieve the total points for the Houses from CMIS to display in a chart on their smart boards and also in SharePoint and then once that was done some more detailed information for the logged in pupil.
Creating the query was a case of figuring out the database structure. As all the events are configurable, it was a little tricky, but once I’d got my head round it, it was straight-forward enough. That took care of their smart boards as they came with built in charting facilities. For SharePoint, I could have created a charting web part, but I had a bit of a look round first, and came up with Bamboo solutions Chart Web Part. This had the advantage of already working, multiple chart formats and the school could re-use it if they had any other charting requirements. The only tricky bit with the Bamboo web part is that the school wanted each column as a different colour so I had to turn the result into a pivot table which is not the easiest in SQL Server.
That was the charts sorted, now we wanted to display for a pupil when they are logged in:
1. The pupil’s house
2. A summary of their points: total, total positive and total negative
3. The details of each event together with the points scored.
4. A summary of the points for all the houses: again total, total positive and total negative
To enable this I created the Data Viewer web part I talked about in my last post. This enabled me to display the above information just by writing a new query, which was simple as I already understood the database structure and the pupil’s ID was already stored in Active Directory.
Result was a site showing all the House Point information requested. It looks good and hopefully will inspire the pupils to make a success of the House system.
The latest Salamander web part is Salamander Data Viewer. It basically allows you to run a SQL query against a database and display the results in a grid styled in a SharePoint manner. It’s not dissimilar to the Data View you can add throuh SharePoint Designer, but is simpler to use and you can use parameterised queries. It’s a quick and easy way to display data from your databases in SharePoint.
The current features are:
- Grid is sortable
- Grid supports paging
- Can add to a page from the web part gallery rather than altering the page in SharePoint Designer
- Can have parametrised queries. Currently supports using Active Directory attributes of the logged in user, but it’s very simple to add other types such as items in the query string. I’ll add more as they get requested
If anyone is interested then drop me a line and you can get a trial version. The page on the main web site is http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/dataViewer.html.
