Another standard Web Part that I learned about at the Mindsharp Power End User summit was the Content Query Web Part. I was reminded of this Web Part while thinking further about yesterday's site-wide alert conundrum. What's the connection between the two, you ask?
I'm glad you asked! It's because the Content Query Web Part is a rollup Web Part which allows you to pull content from throughout an entire site collection and display those contents within a Web Part in any area of the site. For example, this ability would allow you to pull all, say, announcements from throughout a site collection, and display them all in a single Web Part on any Web Part page within that site collection. Granted, this lacks the immediacy of an actual alert, but it is another way you could get at least part of the way towards cleanly displaying all (of a certain type of) new/updated content from within a site collection.
To add a Content Query Web Part to your site, first locate it within the list of available Web Parts on your site. I found it under the Default heading in the Web Part list, and checked the box to add it to my test site:
Having added the Content Query Web Part to my Web Part page, this is what it looked like (in the default Edit Mode) in my sandbox:
As you can see, there's already a fair amount of non-default content present in the above image. I suspect that this is because it's a shared Web Part in our shared test area and, as a result, we're seeing links created by others within that common sandbox. Nevertheless, I hope this provides a reasonable sense of the sort of content you can pull into (or rollup, to use the officially sanctioned SharePoint nomenclature for such behavior) the Content Query Web Part and then display on your Web Part page.
To give you a sense of how the appearance of this multi-purpose Web Part might change once you click on a hyperlink that's been set up to rollup content from elsewhere, here's what the Web Part shown above looks like when I click the Sites Directory hyperlink:
Since I don't want to tax your patience with an overlong blog entry, I'm going to break here and we'll pick up tomorrow with a step-by-step walk through of the Content Query Tool Part, which is the clever name for the Content Query's Tool Pane. This is where we find out how the Content Query magic happens, so be sure to tune in tomorrow!
Posted
Oct 09 2008, 05:22 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.