This is another of a several part series on using Sharepoint
One of my favorite out-of-the-box features of Microsoft’s Sharepoint is connections between web parts. Sharepoint web pages are designed with “web parts” – drag and drop boxes that have some purpose. A web part might be images or content or even a spreadsheet. The connections function allows you (in seconds!) to connect one web part to another based on data they contain.
This is particularly useful if you have a lot of data with a parent-child relationship. For example, if I am displaying a list of Customers, I might want to click on a customer and know things like what products they’ve purchased or if they have any open support calls or even contact information.
I can create a web part to display the list of companies, one to list support calls, one to list products, and one to list contact information.
I can then link them so that when I select a company, all the other web parts on the page (using a linked field like Customer ID) will automatically filter their data to only show me relevant entries. I can now select a customer and see various details that will help me do my job more efficiently – and if things change and I want to add more data or take some away, I can do that just as quickly!
Dynamic content has been around for a while, but dynamically linked dynamic content after a few steps and no programming skills? You can see why it’s one of my favorite features.
Have you ever seen a MOSS 2007 installation where the “connections” option is simply missing from the web parts Edit menu? Is there a configuration flag someplace that enables “connections”? Advice would be greatly appreciated.
Hi LJ, I ran into this problem when I was first using connections – they don’t show up under the web part menu unless you’re in “Edit Mode”.
I hope this solves it for you, too!
tks for the effort you put in here I appreciate it!
I have the same issue as L J. I am in edit mode and the connections option is missing from the list of edit option –
which in order are:
Minimize
Close
Delete
Modify Shared Web Part
Connections
with connections missing
Hi Ghazanfar,
The only other time I’ve seen connections missing is when the item itself doesn’t do connections. I think that there are some web part types that don’t connect to others.
For more information, you might try the Microsoft Forums. While I’m definitely a SharePoint user, I’m far from an expert! Good luck with your issue and if you find the answer, please feel free to update us here.
Update for 2010: Will happen when you drop a Web Part in a non-web part page (ie a Wiki page)