Data View Web Parts (DVWPs) are, to me, the most powerful feature in SharePoint. You’ve probably heard them called the Swiss Army Knife of SharePoint and there’s really very little that you can’t display with them if you understand how they work. But understanding the inner working of DVWPs requires knowledge of some pretty crufty concepts: CAML and XSL. In this series, I hope to demystify the XSL side of things a bit by explaining the most common XSL tags you’re likely to see in DVWPs and what you can do with them.
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Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… <xsl:value-of> Outputs the value to which it evaluates, whether it be the value of a column, a variable, etc. <xsl:value-of> is sort of the “biggie” XSL tag. It’s what you use to output values of things that are variable. Pretty much every other tag we’ve talked about exists to get you to…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… As I got into writing this “last” article in the series, I realized that between the things people have asked me over the course of the series and the things I think might be useful, I have far more than one more article to write. I think I’ll keep this series going…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… In the last article, I talked about teasing out the various parts of the values in Person or Group column values. To do this, I relied on the substring functions which are available to us in XSL. In this article, I’ll go over a few of those string functions and show you…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… If you’ve been following this series, you’ve seen me write about the ddwrt namespace functions multiple times. They are extremely helpful functions that really aren’t documented in any formal way. A few of them show up in the XPath Expression Builder, but most of them are a mystery unless you find Serge…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… Another day, another wunnerful article about the DVWP. This time, I’m going to cover some of the most useful “built-in” Field / Node functions. These are functions that are a part of XSL itself and help you work with nodes in the result set. A node is a geekier term for a…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… When I made my initial pass through the XSL tags for this series, I missed a few. The example XSL I used in Parts 1 through 11 was very basic: just what you’ve get if you added a DVWP to a page to display the Title column of a list and that…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… There are a few more XSL tags that I should briefly touch upon. They are used much less often than the others that I’ve covered, but more than the bunch that I’m not going to talk about at all. There’s a set of them that are really only going to make sense…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… I’m going to go back to the XPath Math / Number functions for this article to cover a few of them. Most of these functions are fairly intuitive, but I’m a math guy. (Yup, I even majored in it in college back during the Renaissance.) However, I find that the “documentation” in…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… In the last article, I covered some of the XPath Math / Number functions; in this one, I’ll cover the rest. The first set included the ones that I considered somewhat tricky, and the ones in this article ought to be more straightforward. One thing that I forgot to mention in the…
Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com… Whoa, Bessie! I forgot about one of the most useful XSL tags for Data View Web Parts (DVWPs)! <xsl:import> allows you to be highly modular in storing your XSL templates for reuse. I mentioned this back in Part 13 briefly, but I should go into it in some more detail. This post…