Bernard Hennecker's Blog

Introduction

In the previous articles, I briefly shared some of the reasons to deploy one or more site collections, the advantages and disadvantages of using sites, lists/libraries or columns to group resources and the overall approach we use to power communities from a collaboration and publication perspective.
In this one, I will introduce the concept of contexts. This is the way I work to group related resources and display them together through dynamic pages.

Scenario

The following example shows how to handle and display items (news, resources, contacts) that are relevant for several contexts (industries, solutions).
A company ABC sells solutions that are applicable for several industries. In addition, it runs initiatives or programs that span across those industries and solutions. News, documents and contacts are respectively stored in one announcement list, one document library and one contact list (for the sake of simplicity). They are all tagged by means of site columns values that allow to categorize them by industry, solution and keywords (used for initiative here).

The page below displays news, resources and contacts that are relevant for a specific industry:

Other visitors might not be interested in the industries and want to concentrate on one of the solutions only:

Or they might look for resources than span across all industries and solutions and that address a specific domain:

Overview

The following summarizes how this is achieved:

1. industry, solution and keywords (for generic use) site columns are created
2. lists and libraries for news, resources, contacts are configured with those site columns
3. items are added and tagged with site column values
4. a context list is created and used to store context definitions; it looks like:
   
5. a web part page containing a data view web part for each of the sections to be displayed is used; it also contains a web part of the context list that is hidden and connected to all other web parts. The context web part retrieves the context value from the url, filters the context list based on that value, and, via the web part connections, filters the values of all the other lists (news, resources, contacts). Here is how the empty web part page looks when there is no context assigned:
   
6. by invoking this page with the desired context, it renders the resources according to the context definition. For the first screen above (Aerospace), the following url is used: http://sharepointserver/test4bernard/home.aspx?context=aerospace
   This is the link that is used in the left navigation to access the Aerospace page

What’s next

In the following articles, I will enumerate the reasons for using such context list and explain some of the technical aspects of the implementation.