An enhanced List View Web Part has been published in the Trentacular SharePoint 2007 Features CodePlex project. This custom web part serves as a substitute for the out-of-the-box List View Web Part, offering additional capabilities to improve user experience.
Key Features
The enhanced List View Web Part comes with two notable features:
- In-place view toggling: Users can switch between different views without leaving the web part page.
- Cross-site list display: The web part can display lists located in different sites within the same SharePoint Farm.
Development Challenges
Developing this custom web part has proven to be quite challenging, and alternative solutions or assistance would be greatly appreciated. The current implementation involves accessing the SPLimitedWebPartManager at the selected view’s URL to load the SharePoint List View Web Part. Reflection is then used to invoke the private RenderView method of the Web Part.
While this approach may seem unconventional, the available SharePoint ListView control did not work well with many custom views, particularly those utilizing managed content types. The SPView.RenderAsHtml method also presented problems.
Potential Alternatives
One possible alternative could involve using the ListViewByQuery WebControl. However, this would require considerable coding efforts to replicate the sorting and filtering capabilities offered by the ListView control.
If you believe this web part could be useful and are interested in contributing to its development, please feel free to get in touch and share your ideas.