SharePoint Zen

Filtering SQL Data View Web Parts in SharePoint

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:31:28 +0000

SharePoint's XSLT Data View Web Parts do support incoming Web Part Connections, but they are a fragile bunch. Connecting a Filter provider Web Part to List View Web Parts is straightforward. Connecting to a List-bound XSLT Data View can be a tad more tricky depending on circumstances, but still fairly easy. Connecting to an SQL-bound Data View requires a few Serious Setup Steps. This walkthrough helps you through it.

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SharePoint Value Range Filtering: the New, Simplified Way

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:12:03 +0000

One reason for FilterZen's popularity is its range-filtering capabilities.

Think about the out-of-box filtering and search capabilities of SharePoint: drilling down into a specific sub-range, whether in date-time terms ("show me data between March and August") or in numeric terms ("show me sales between 100 and 500"), if you don't want to Modify your List View everytime you want to see certain data sub-ranges, then neither the built-in Advanced Search nor the built-in Column header drop-down filter menus will take you there.

FilterZen made this possible, but until today this involved a number of redundant manual set-up steps. The more steps there are, or the more repetetive those are, the more there is scope for mistakes and omissions. As we saw how popular range filters are, we decided to save you even more hassle and time and further streamline the process for you...

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SharePoint List Filtering by User Group Membership

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:14:52 +0000

A FilterZen user enquired about the following requirement:

I have three SharePoint groups called Branch1, Branch2 and Branch3. What I want to have happen is that when user of Branch1 hit my list they only see Branch1's records. When Branch2 users connect they only she Branch2's records and so on.

An interesting filtering requirement that we wanted FilterZen (our SharePoint Filter Web Part) to support fully. Starting with build 3.6.0.10 (the newest available for download at the point of writing), this can now be achieved with any User Filter.

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Export to CSV with SharePoint List item version history: new in ExportZen 1.3

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:10:35 +0000

ExportZen 1.3 was just released and this update now supports exporting the full version history of your exported SharePoint List items or Document Library records!

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How to: schedule or batch-invoke SharePoint CSV exports

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:59:37 +0000

In a perfect world, we would already offer you a "proper" SharePoint Timer Job to schedule CSV exports of List data. Don't worry, this is on the medium-term product roadmap. Until we get there, there is another way which I want to show you today. So good news: you can start scheduling with this Right Now. This involves only a few setup steps that a later, integrated SharePoint Timer Job would be able to take care of fully. Overall, no rocket science is to be expected, though.

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SharePoint List Filtering by Date Spans: a Stepwise Tutorial

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:32:11 +0000

FilterZen power user and SharePoint consultant Harry Parsonage (of , California) wrote this step-by-step walkthrough on how to set up date-range filters for work with SharePoint Lists, and invited us to share it with the public. This tutorial will be a real time-saver for newcomers to FilterZen (especially until we finalize a much simplified Date Range Filter Wizard user interface for this often-needed use case, which is on the medium-term roadmap). As so often, once you know the basic steps, you can click your filters together in under 5 minutes; however, figuring those out for the first time takes some experimentation and can quickly take much longer than anticipated. Harry, thanks a lot for this invaluable contribution to your fellow SharePoint power filterers!

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It's all Give-and-Take: introducing our free Lite editions

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:55:19 +0000

Effective today, we're changing our licensing model from Commercial-only to a Free-and-Commercial hybrid, and I'm very happy and excited to announce this.

We streamlined our previous three commercial editions (Standard, Professional and Enterprise) into two (Basic and Ultimate) and added a freeware edition called Lite. Starting today, each of our current and future SharePoint add-ons, Web Parts, tools and solutions will always be also offered in an unlimited freeware Lite edition, no strings attached...

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How to do PeopleZen CSS Customizations

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:16:51 +0000

An 'Upcoming Birthdays' Web Part in 10 minutes

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:04:14 +0000

Who doesn't love birthday calendars? So let's add one to your team site! Out of the box, SharePoint does not offer much help with that assignment. What are your options?

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Month and Year Drop-Downs for Advanced Date Range Filtering in SharePoint

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:29:29 +0000

When we introduced you to FilterZen's value range filtering capabilities for SharePoint List Views, Data Views and other Web Parts back in June, we showed you the simplest possible solution that uses Date Filters. As you probably know, Date Filters can send date or date/time values, optionally in a specific locale and format, and optionally offering a SharePoint Date Picker for end-users to make a selection. With the above solution in place, you can let your users choose the bounding start and end dates to form the filter range just by making your Date Filters interactive from their settings pane.

Sometimes, however, that is not quite the user experience you want to deliver for date range filtering. For example, users may prefer just selecting from readily populated drop-down lists bounding start and end months rather than picking the 1st and 31st dates via That Nuisance of a Date Picker. Just two days ago we received a request to that effect:

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Wild-card search with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS) Filter Web Parts

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:24:14 +0000

Wild-card search in SharePoint can be tricky to implement. When you're dealing with List or Business data in List Views, Business Data Lists, Data Form or Data View Web Parts, you can easily achieve the desired effect of wild-card search by simply creating any kind of filter using the FilterZen Filter Web Part and then setting the filter operator from the default kind ("Equals") to the "Contains" operator. Here's how...

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Using value-range filtering and CAML operators in Filter Web Parts

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:21:20 +0000

Version 3.0 of FilterZen introduced advanced support for sending multiple filter values to connected List View and Data View Web Parts. One intriguing use case that inspired this capability was a requirement to filter a Date/Time column based on a certain date range, i.e. only setting an interval such as "between 1^st January 2008 and 30^th April 2008" and filtering a view on column data falling into this range.

With FilterZen, you can achieve this easily by configuring a FilterZen Filter Web Part as follows...

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Highlights in FilterZen 2.6

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:43:38 +0000

We've just pushed out FilterZen 2.6, which introduces outstanding support for the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise Edition Business Data Catalog (BDC). So what's new in this release, among from a number of small performance and usability improvements and some impressive bug fixes?

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New in FilterZen 2.4: SQL Data Filters

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:03:34 +0000

We're excited to announce the newest update to FilterZen, the ultimate Filter Web Part for SharePoint. Among minor bug fixes and optimizations, this service release 2.4 introduces a brand-new, highly useful filter type: SQL Data Filters.

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FilterZen How To: Create and Set Up Web Parts Programmatically

Philipp Schumann [ROXORITY] — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:52:13 +0000

We've quietly launched the newest release of FilterZen yesterday — without much fanfare yet, until this web site has been completely updated content-wise — a fantastic release that finally pushed the tool from being the URL Filter Web Part for SharePoint to being the Filter Web Part for SharePoint. URL filtering is still supported and got even better, but now there's a wealth of other highly useful filter types in there, many new powerful capabilities, and yet it's all still available in just one single Web Part, reducing complexity and clutter in your Web Part catalog.

We received one enquiry about programmatically creating and setting up the Web Part: a use case that was intriguing enough to warrant the following (code-heavy) tutorial.

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