SharePoint Development & Administration + InfoPath

I recently wanted to display data from a Web Service on a page in SharePoint using XSL.   The Web Service was external to SharePoint, which resulted in the Data View web Part being unable to obtain a valid result required to allow the XSL template to be built using features of SharePoint Designer.  A separate issue was that the method used to query the web service hosted on my external server consumed resources on the external application and took around 5 seconds to receive a response from the query.  Using a Data View web part connected directly to the Web Service to display the result would require that the data is obtained every time the page loads, impacting on server performance.

This article explains how to create a dynamic filter menu for content in SharePoint.  Methods from the article  SharePoint: List Distinct (unique) values from a specific column in a list are used to obtain unique values from a specific column in a SharePoint list to be displayed as each menu item.  When an filter option from the menu is selected, content on the page will be filtered based on the selection.   For a single menu displaying filter options dynamically, you only need to associate the menu with one column from the main list.  When an option is selected, the browser is redirected to the same page with a query string parameter set to the selected filter parameter using JavaScript.  The main list on the page is then configured to filter contents based on the parameter. Components: Document Library with custom column "Heading" One Web Part page with the following components: Data View Web Part displaying the actual documents in the li...

The following describes two methods to list distinct/unique values from a specific column in a SharePoint list.  An example where this may be useful is a menu system providing filter options for items in a list, using only values that are being used at the time.   Display Unique Values using Data View Grouping (No Code): Obtaining a distinct/unique list of values from a specific column in a SharePoint list can be achieved easily using a Data View Web Part, and by applying sort and group criteria to group items.  When grouping (group by) criteria of a Data View web part has been provided, the result is a distinct (unique) list of values from the particular column in the list that will be displayed as group headings.  Once the Data View is listing items grouped by the specified column, you can manually modify (remove cells/rows) the XSL template used to display the table to remove the actual list items from under each group (use Design mode in SPD to ...