What's In the SharePoint List Filters Collection... and Why Do I Care?

{This post is largely about the SharePoint List Filters Collection, although technically, it's also about board games and TV shows. If you want to skip straight to the meaty product stuff, check out the video below. If you'd like a little more narrative, read the post -- but then come back and watch the video anyways. It's like Bamboo Theatre, only with an added literary component. We just keep raising the bar around here, don't we?}

List Views and The Agony of Defeat

I guess there's no need for it nowadays, what with the Internet and all, but remember back when television game shows used to give away "home editions" of the game to the people who lost? Man, what a kick in the pants that was. The guy standing next to you gets $25,000, and you get to re-live the experience of NOT winning again and again for the rest of your life. Is that supposed to be funny? Or was it some kind of cruel dig at your expense -- kind of a "well, you're obviously not very good at our game {chuckle, chuckle} ... why don't you go practice a little?"

The point is, the home edition of, say, Wheel of Fortune was a pretty crappy substitute for going on the actual Wheel of Fortune TV show, and everyone knew it. Still, I guess it was better than nothing. 

Now, obviously this analogy doesn't map exactly with SharePoint, as basic WSS actually has the core functionality of MOSS, and actually powers it. That'd be more like if the television version of Jeopardy was actually a bunch of people playing the Jeopardy board game, with a host, on national television (riveting TV, I'm sure), or if you could still win money playing the home version (every child's dream). But there ARE a number of exclusive MOSS niceties even a casual WSS user could benefit from, and some of the workarounds are nearly as depressing as sitting at home pretending your dog is Pat Sajak. ("I'd like to buy a vowel, Pat, and stop violating the table leg.")

One of these things is list filtering, and since SharePoint users spend a lot of time working with or just straight up browsing list data, it's no small potato. (Is that even a phrase? Whatever, it is now.) MOSS includes a collection of filter web parts that let users quickly and easily restrict the data that flows into another, connected part. 

Need a visual? For our admittedly high-concept purposes, it's basically like this:

Now, you don't need a middleman Web Part just to restrict what kind of data shows up in a destination Web Part. You can do that by creating a List View, and then configuring the destination Web Part to use that view -- you probably do this all the time anyways. But are you seriously going to create a List View for every possible filtering option your users might need when they're looking at a list? Are they going to do this? And even if they do, are they supposed to go into the tool pane and select the appropriate filter whenever they want to see different data? Isn't there a low effort, less-destructive way to do this?

Well, duh, of course there is. You add a MOSS Filter Web Part, connect it to both the Source List and Destination Part, and let the end user simply choose their filtering option without having to mess with either of the former. Want to filter by date? You add a date filter, users enter a date, and poof, the data fed into the web part is filtered. No tool pane, so permanent changes to anything, no fuss no muss. There are filters for choice columns, text strings, even filters that work silently in the background, filtering data for things like the currently logged in user. 

Fantastic! Problem solved... unless you don't have MOSS, in which case you're probably forced to create the aforementioned abominable pile of List Views, or to simply give up and ask your users to scroll through buckets of irrelevant list items. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that's not a good way to generate "end user buy-in" -- then again, this is a pretty stupid way to play Jeopardy, and thousands of people did it (probably grudgingly) for years. 

Well, fear not, WSS users -- Bamboo's SharePoint List Filters Collection is here, and it's the predictably, wonderfully obvious solution to your problem you've come to expect from us. It includes WSS-compatible versions of four of the most popular, immediately useful filter types that come with MOSS, plus an all new "super filter" we came up with designed specifically for filtering a List View Web Part (you know, when you stick a list on a page).

The first four Web Parts are exactly what you'd think they are -- MOSS style filters for various data types that work just like their MOSS counterparts. The fifth is a little different; it allows you to build a single filtering interface containing multiple custom filters. If you've got a giant list of projects, for instance, with start date, manager, department, and project code, the List Filter Web Part let's you create a master filtering interface with options for any or all of these columns, even if they're different types (as they are in this example). You just add all the columns you want users to be able to filter by, select the order, and the part takes care of the rest, adding user interface elements (drop downs, date and people pickers, text fields) that match the corresponding column type.

So, using our example, you could easily create a page with your List View Web Part, and a List Filter Web Part next to it, containing department drop down, manager people picker, start date calendar picker, and project code text field. End users can then fill in whichever items they want to include, and ignore the ones they don't -- the result is instantly filtered data fed into the List View Web Part.

SharePoint can do a lot of amazing things, but don't forget, end users are going to spend a whole lot of their time looking for list items in lists with way too many of them. The easier you can make that process, the better SharePoint is going to work -- and with the SharePoint List Filters Collection, you can make that process a whole lot easier with very, very little effort. Check it out at no cost for 30 days, and you'll see what I mean.