Wednesday, April 07, 2004 7:07 PM
Jan Tielens
How-to: Display Contents of a SharePoint List From Another Site
Some people are wondering if it’s possible to display the contents of a SharePoint list that resides on another SharePoint site. Yes this is possible, even better: I’ll show you how to accomplish this! Suppose you have a SharePoint Task list on your root site that contains some tasks. You also have a sub site on which you want to display the contents of the Task list of the root site. First of all you need to create the Task list on the root site of course.
Next create the sub site, if you haven’t create it yet. We’re going to use FrontPage 2003 to accomplish our task, so fire up FronPage 2003 and open the sub site. We want to display the tasks on the start page of that site, so open default.aspx as well. From the Data menu choose the “Insert Data View…” menu item. In the Data Source Catalog task pane you’ll see a list of available data sources on the current site (Sub Site), of course the tasks are not in that list. On the bottom of the task pane, click “Manage catalog…”, a new window is displayed in which we can enter additional data sources. Click the Add button and enter the url of the root site as location, and choose a description for this data source. Close the window by clicking the OK button. Now you can use the task pane to browse to the data sources located on the root site!
Finishing off is very easy: drag and drop the task list from the Data Source Catalog to the web part zone, that’s it. If you want to you can alter the view (e.g. add or remove some columns), when you’re done don’t forget to save the page. The result is that you have a nice formatted web part that shows the tasks from a list on another site:
As you can see data sources are very powerful in FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint. This time we've used a SharePoint list as a data source, but you can use several other types of datasources for example web services. Don't underestimate the power of FrontPage 2003! :-)
Filed under: SharePoint