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.
I had an interesting request from one of my customers asking if Salamander My Sites could filter the sites returned by the roles the user has on the sites. I was interested enough, and it was easy enough that I added it straight away.
I’ve added a new property “Permission”, which you set to one of the permissions/roles in SharePoint e.g. Contribute. The web part will then only display sites on which the user has that permission/role.
The only limitation that I’m aware of is that the role name is case-sensitive. If the role is not present then the web part will display an error message.
The web part remains free and can be downloaded from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/webparts/mysites.zip.
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.