Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

Chapter 18. Creating Web Part Connections

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring Web part connections

Managing Web part connections

Web part connections, as the name suggests, is a mechanism to connect Web parts together in a source-target–like arrangement. The source Web part is used to provide parameter values to the target Web part, and based on these values, the target Web part can perform operations on the data it exposes. The source Web part, called the data provider, implements an interface to send rows of data to the target Web part, called the data consumer. SharePoint allows you to identify data consumers placed either on the same page as a data provider or on different Web pages.

While SharePoint Designer provides an advanced user interface to create Web part connections between Web parts on a Web page, the capability to create Web part connections is inherent to SharePoint itself. For example, if you have two custom lists that contain related data in your SharePoint site, you can create a Web part connection between Web parts for these lists using the SharePoint Web site interface in a Web browser.

This chapter discusses how you can connect two or more Web parts by using Web part connections to interface with each other for performing operations such as filtering, sorting, etc. I show you how you can use the SharePoint Web site user interface to create basic Web part connections between two or more Web parts on the same page.

Later, using SharePoint Designer, I talk about how the ...