Preview Pane View of a SharePoint List

Sometimes with all of the things SharePoint can do, you tend to look over many interesting items until someone else mentions them. This happened today when I saw a post by the SharePoint Team at Tallan. The post discussed using the Preview Pane view of a list.



This view allows the user to hover over a list item and see all the other values for the list item. This is all OOTB functionality in SharePoint. All you have to do is go to Modify This View and under the style section select Preview Pane.



I can definitely see this being used in our Intranet installation to allow users to easily thumb through many items to see the related information for that list item.

More SharePoint 2010 News

If you haven't found them already, Microsoft has some sneak peek videos for SharePoint 2010. There is some pretty exciting stuff coming down the pipeline, including better integration with Visual Studio, the Developer Dashboard, and LINQ for SharePoint.

One caveat that you will want to be aware of: SharePoint 2010 is only supported in 64 bit environments, so you may need to upgrade your environment before making the switch.

Convert to XSLT Data View

Sometimes when working with SharePoint list views, you may want to be able to customize the view to include additional information or to have the list items link to a specific URL. This was the case with a recent project of mine. I wanted to be able to direct the user to a page that would log which articles from a list they were viewing. That way we could track which products were receiving more questions and train the sales reps accordingly.



I began by creating some custom views and setting some filter criteria on them. When you do this it creates an ASPX page under the list. You can view these pages using SharePoint Designer. When I viewed the page I could not find a discernible block of code that corresponded to the link that gets created on a list item so that you can view the details for that item.



Then I remembered the Convert to XSLT Data View option. If you right-click on a list view web part and selec this option it will convert the list view code into XSLT. It is much easier to find blocks of code this way. I used this to make the default URL in the list item links point to my page and then redirect the user to the list item.



One thing to be aware of is that if you switch to the XSLT Data View, you will no longer be able to modify the view from the browser. The only option available will be to change the name of the view. You can overcome this by opening the view in SharePoint Designer and right-clicking on the web part again and selecting Revert to SharePoint list view. This will remove any of the customizations that you made, though, but it will allow you to edit the view in the browser again.

Slide.Show and SharePoint

I was recently looking for a way to display a slide show of images for a section of our Intranet and came across Slide.Show. It is an open source project that uses Silverlight and allows the end-user to highly customize the presentation (although this is not documented real well yet). You can attach the slide show to an XML file, Flickr, or a custom provider (such as a SharePoint list). The setup is pretty easy. This series of posts by Robert MacLean describes how he attached the Slide.Show to a SharePoint Photo Library.



This makes it even easier for users to add and remove photos from the slide show. They can upload them to the photo library and the slide show will start showing them. This is the ultimate goal that I would like to reach with this so that I don't have to manage the photos for the end users. I simply set up permissions to the photo library and let them manage the photos how they want.



One drawback to the Slide.Show project is it using Silverlight. Although many people installed it to watch the Olympics, there are still good number of people that do not have it installed. For these users, they will see the blue Download Silverlight button and if they are not as tech savy, might not want to download Silverlight if they don't know what it is. Until Microsoft pushes Silverlight out as a required download, this will be an issue.