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Organizing Web Part Pages

Over time, the number of these Web Part pages will grow. It is possible to organize related "documents" into separate document libraries — similar to folders on a network or local drive. As the number of pages and document libraries grow, the need for some type of navigation increases.

The default home page has a Quick Launch bar that can display links to each of these document libraries. A property setting of the document library is used to identify which libraries are displayed. The Quick Launch bar does not provide any "deep links" to the individual documents; these must be created in some other fashion.

Using FrontPage 2003, programmers can create additional link bars. However, these link bars must be manually updated. To make the site administration easier, it would be helpful if a property could be set on each document to identify which documents to display. To implement this idea, I created a DocLib Quick Launch Web Part that displays links to the individual pages within a specified library. This Web Part, in combination with additional properties on the document library, allows end users to choose which pages have links displayed.

In the image below, the DocLib Quick Launch has been placed into the left column. At the bottom of the Tool Pane, the Web Part is configured to display links from the Web Pages document library.

The document library requires an additional column titled SortOrder. Since Document Libraries are similar to lists, custom columns can be added. (Click on Modify settings and columns at the bottom left of the All Documents view.) Add the column to the default view. Then, update the recently added page (called End-User Content in this example) to have a sort order of 10.

Since it is possible that a document library may contain documents that need not be shown in the Quick Launch, the Web Part only displays links for documents with a sort order greater than 0. The Web Part will display the name of the document library and links to the documents.

Next Steps

In the next article in this series, I will review the DocLib Quick Launch Web Part in detail — including source code. This Web Part can provide navigational links for a document library with very minimal effort.

Combining the Content Editor Web Part (and other Web Parts) on a page template will provide almost everything that an end-user requires. Starting with an MSDN article on customizing the page templates, (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/sharepoint_creatingcustomwpptemplates.asp) we can create a complete solution for end-user content editors. Look for more details in an upcoming article.

About this series
This series of articles on SharePoint is intended to help you understand the capabilities of the product, as well as provide tips and tricks, development ideas, information from Microsoft, information from the community, and perhaps some samples. Like many other series on IntranetJournal.com, I plan to include how-to articles that can help you with your deployments — ways to customize a page; deployment scenarios; content management; etc. With such a diverse product, there is no lack of topics for this series of articles. What would you like to read?

About the author
Paul Schaeflein is a developer with more than 20 years experience. Paul has been developing dynamic and interactive Web sites since 1996. Paul has worked on all of the versions of SharePoint and has worked with the .NET framework since its debut. You can reach Paul through his blog at http://www.schaeflein.NET/blog/.