SharePoint Config

I’ve had a couple of requests to extend the people directory I covered in a previous article on How to: Create a Simple SharePoint 2010 People Directory. One request was to show how to display the results in a table based layout. Displaying a basic table like the one shown below is really straightforward and simply involves some modifications to the XSL property of the search results web part.

I’ve had a few clients ask for a page on their intranet that allows users to browse a list of people within the organisation without having to enter a search query. They then want to see a list of filters such as Department or Job Title to allow them to filter the results. This is really easy to set up using the default SharePoint 2010 search web parts and doesn’t require writing a single line of code. An example of what this can look like is shown below (note no query is specified, we have just clicked on the ‘people directory’ link in the top nav):

This is a short post to show how you can use the SPDataSource to display items from a specific folder in a SharePoint document library. While the other parameters are fairly well documented on MSDN this isn’t very clear. Generally I don’t recommend the use of folders to separate data, I prefer a metadata based approach. In some cases, however, it makes sense such as when you need to manage permissions or approval for a group of documents (especially in SharePoint 2007 where you don’t have document sets). Looking at the parameters we can use (as shown below) to identify and locate the data it would appear that passing the name of the folder to the RootFolder property would achieve this. Continue reading Displaying files from a specific folder using SPDataSource »