Thursday, February 12, 2004 10:17 PM
Jan Tielens
Adding some essential functionality to SharePoint: Breadcrumbs, Navigation & MyAlerts
Update2: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/03/11/88118.aspx
Update: I've added a What's New web part to this library, for more details: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/03/04/84011.aspx
In some of my previous posts I've complained a little bit about the rather limited SharePoint functionality. But I'm lucky: SharePoint is extremely extensible and (last but not least) I'm a developer! (don't know which of the two is the best) So I've created following webparts:
- Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials.Navigation
Navigation in SharePoint isn't great, you can view subsites and stuff like that by using the Site Settings page but this isn't a great “user experience“ (nice buzz-word isn't it?). So now there is the Navigation webpart which displays the structure of a SharePoint portal in a tree structure (only the sites to which the user has access are showed).
There are two properties for this webpart which you can use to tweak the contents. The Levels property determines how many levels in the tree structure should be showed. If you select the Start from Root property, the tree structure starting from the root site is displayed, even if you place this webpart on a subsite.
- Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials.MyAlerts
Just like the Navigation webpart, the MyAlerts gives you a shortcut to the alerts of the site the webpart is placed on, for the current user of course.
Additionally this webpart enables you to quickly add an alert for each list on the site.
- Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials.BreadCrumbs
The last one is pretty simple, as the name says: it displays breadcrumbs:
Again there are two properties to alter the contents of this webpart. The Levels property sets the number of links to display. The Separator property enables you to change the characters displayed between the links. Since I like slashes the default is space + slash + space.
These three webparts are in the Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials assembly. To deploy them, just put this assembly in the GAC (for example), put the DWP files in the wpcatalog directory of your SharePoint site and add the following node to the SafeControls section of the web.config:
<SafeControl Assembly="Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1a431c1526626774" Namespace="Leadit.SharePoint.Essentials" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
I've deployed these webparts to some site without any problems, but please test them before you use them in a production envirionment! :-) If you don't like them, feel free to alter the source code, I'd appriciate if you'd let me know what you changed. The source code or the binaries can be downloaded using following links:
Updated versions (more info):
Again updated: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/03/04/84011.aspx
Filed under: SharePoint