I certainly hope the site is not gone for good. Laura's posts have been a life saver. The reaosn I stumbled across this thread is because the site was the SharePoint 911 site was down and I had forgotten one step in Laura's instructions. I was looking to
see if anyone else had posted the instructions or similar instructions. I didn't find even one post on how to do this partial filter! However, later in the day I raided my co-workers files and found a paper copy (who says we don't need hard copy anymore!)
of Laura's instructions. If the SharePoint 911 site isn't up and running by the end of the business day today, I'll type the instructions and post here. Laura's instructions are too valuable to be lost. This partial filter turns the SharePoint text filter
into a hybrid filter/search tool and it works really well (ie...it's fast even on 6000+ record lists). I checked just now and the SharePoint 911 site is still down. Let's hope the admins were just off for MLK day.
GreatWest
Well the site is up but the blogs are still down.
These instructions are for SharePoint Designer 2010. Laura’s instructions are for SharePoint Designer 2007.
Edit the page in SharePoint Designer where you have your list displayed as a web part.
Insert a Text Filter web part on the page.
Click to select the list web part on the page so it is active
From the List View Tools / Options tab at the top of Designer select Parameters
Click New Parameter in the Data View Parameters window that opens
Type in a parameter name that you’ll recognize (something unique)
On the Parameter Source pull down, select Query String
In Query String Variable type in a variable name that you’ll recognize (again something unique)
Click OK
From the List View Tools / Options tab at the top of Designer select Filter
Click in the Field Name pull down and select the field the filter is to look at for data
In the Comparison pull down select Contains (this is the trick to look for a partial)
In the value pull down select your parameter name
If you want, you can add another look up and do an and / or
Right click on your text filter web part and select Add Connection
From the pull down in the Web Part Connections Wizard select Send Filter Values to and click next
On the Connect to a Web part on this page click next
On the Target Web part select the appropriate list
On Target action select Get Filter Values From
Click next
In the two windows that appear, select the columns you wish to compare
Click next
Click Finish and you’re done
Open the page in SharePoint and enter a partial, something similar to what’s in the column the filter is filtering on (Will for William and so on).
The filter will filter out all items not containing “Will” – Laura notes that this works well except that no data at all is displayed until information
is placed in the filter. Also another note – clearing the text from the filter does not clear the filter. We found that we had to exit the page with this type of filter on it and then go back to the page if we wanted the filter clear. You can type into
the filter and change it but on a page with multiple filters using and/or, sometimes the user wants all the filters clear. What we did was to create a blank page with an HTML meta tag redirect back to the filter page. Then we placed a URL link on the filter
page (CLEAR FILTERS). When the users click on the CLEAR FILTERS link, the blank page is displayed and promptly returns the user back to the filters page so they can start with fresh filters again.
Thanks goes to Laura Rogers for this partial filter and I certainly hope SharePoint 911 gets her blog back up and running. I need to print off a lot of her SharePoint
tricks.
