Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Importing and Displaying Data

The Data View Web Part allows you to flexibly display data from several data sources on your SharePoint site. Using SharePoint Designer, you can connect to, select fields from, or display and format data from these sources:

• SharePoint Lists and Libraries: Lists and libraries on the site on which you are using the Data View Web Part are automatically populated in the SharePoint Designer Data Source Library. You can define connections to SharePoint Lists and Libraries from other sites in the site collection.

• Databases: The Data View Web Part can consume a database connection to any SQL Server database, through the SQL Server database connection provider or an OLE DB through the corresponding OLE DB data provider. Additionally, you can use a custom connection string to configure a connection to any Oracle, ODBC, OLE DB, or SQL Server.

  You can configure the database connections with a specific account or use SSO authentication. If you configure the connection with a specific account, the password is stored in clear text, so this method is not recommended if the password needs to be secured.

• XML files: Any XML files can be added to the Data Source Library for use in the Data View Web Part.

• Server-side scripts or RSS feeds: You can define server-side scripts or RSS feeds as data sources for the Data View Web Part.

• XML Web Services: XML Web services allow you to define connections to Web services to get data. This includes, of course, connecting to SharePoint ...