SharePoint Contexts Implementation (contd)
In the previous post, I explained the way I’m grouping related resources and displaying them together through dynamic pages.
One of the essential piece of this implementation is the contexts list that records the characteristics of a context:
For each context, it contains the values that are required to filter appropriately the lists and libraries displayed on the page. But you may argue: why not doing that by simply passing the parameter values in the calling url? For the first context (aerospace), instead of launching the page with the following url: http://sharepointserver/test4bernard/home.aspx?context=aerospace
it would be:
http://sharepointserver/test4bernard/home.aspx?industry=Aerospace&contact=One
There are several reasons for not doing that:
- The most important one is to have url’s that are somewhat immune to organizational changes; in the example above, if the contact for aerospace has to be changed, only the contexts list has to be updated and not the url, which is quite important if the url is referenced from many other locations!
- Changes/updates are performed in one list only.
- If another list or library has to be displayed on the same page and if it uses different columns and/or different column values, a column can be easily added to the contexts list to accommodate to that new list or library.
