Lightning Conductor Web Part

Lightning Conductor Web Part 1.0.0.9

Lightning Tools — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:02:17 GMT

The Lightning Conductor Web Part has undergone some improvements. The main improvement is performance. We have tweaked the Web Part and the Tool Pane to offer better caching of data returned and caching of the crawled Lists, Content Types and Sites within the tool pane. This Caching can be switched on or off depending upon your requirements. Depending on the number of Site Collections, Sites, Lists it could take a while to display that within the data source section below:

To save this delay each time you change the Web Part properties, we can now cache the results by using a checkbox in the toolpane as per the below screenshot.

We listen to our customers no matter how big or small the feature requests are. Many people wanted the ability to switch on or off the column headings within the data grid. This is now available through a check box in the web parts toolpane as well as you can see from the above screenshot.

Within the Web Part we have always displayed the Edit Control Block menu on the title column providing users with the option to click the hyperlink to open an item, or choose the options from the ECB such as View Properties or Edit Properties. This is something that not everyone liked, so this is now optional.

Another improvement is the ability to set the column width for each of the columns displayed, this gives you more control over the display of the returned items. You can see the setting in the below screenshot.

Many other improvements have been made to the web part display since we have built our own alternative to the original SPGridView.

Webinar: Aggregating across Site Collections with...

Lightning Tools — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:37:37 GMT

...Absolutely no programming required.

On Thursday 24th September 2009 at 11:00am Eastern, 4pm GMT Brett Lonsdale will be demonstrating the Lightning Conductor Web Part and how to rollup SharePoint lists items and documents from across multiple site collections without the need of writing any custom XML or XSL. We'll spend 30 minutes exploring some useful scenarios such as displaying documents and meta data in one location as well as how to design the best view of your data using 3 of the available vew options with the LCWP.

If you are interested in attending the free demonstration, please email sales@lightningtools.com to receive joining instructions.

An opportunity will be given at the end of the 30 mintues for any questions that you may have. A fully functional trial version of the web part is available from: http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/lightning-conductor-web-part.aspx

Lightning Conductor Web Part – upcoming release

Lightning Tools — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:23:40 GMT

We wanted to give you some idea of the new features we’ve been working on for the Lightning Conductor Web Part. When you are rolling up lots of content from many different site collections it can be quite overwhelming the number of documents or list items that are returned. You can setup ‘permanent’ filters within the web part toolbar, but if you ever want to change these it is quite a few clicks to do so. What we wanted to implement was a quick way for you to be able to dynamically filter the results coming back.

To allow your users to use quick filters it is simply a case of selecting the option within the web part toolbar properties:

Once this is set you have two options for how to filter your information. You can use the out of the box filter web parts that come with MOSS 2007

(click image to enlarge)

or we’ve added the ability to do dynamic filtering based on values you type in to filter on. This is similar to how the Business Data List Web Parts work

The ability to filter in this way will let us show you how you can use SharePoint in a Getting Things Done kind of way – expect that blog post to be coming soon. This version of the Lightning Conductor Web Part is undergoing testing at the moment – we’ll have more news on a release date very soon.

Any questions, feedback or thoughts please leave a comment!

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Lightning Conductor Web Part XSL Files

Lightning Tools — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:24:53 GMT

The Lightning Conductor Web Part provides you with 3 different types of view: Grid View, Default, or XSL. The XSL file option is only necessary if you want to provide a totally different look to the rolled up data. Following Customer requirements, we have created three more XSL files to help get you started! The XSL files are primarily for Picture Libraries and Documents Libraries. The Document Library XSL files provide you with alternate colors and font examples, another displays Document Icons and finally we have created an XSL file that will display thumbnail images from a picture library. (See below Example)

You can download these XSL files from the following URL: www.lightningtools.com/downloads/lcwpxsl.zip

Lightning Conductor Web Part Articles and Screencasts

Lightning Tools — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:52:18 GMT

The Lightning Conductor Web Part (LCWP) is a Cross Site Collection Roll Up Web Part that can be used within WSS as well as MOSS. The LCWP allows you to rollup from multiple Site Collections, and also easily designed your own views without the need of modifying any XML or XSL. The LCWP also allows you to filter on and display Custom Columns and Site Columns from Custom Content Types. For the developers amongst you, we have given you the option to also use XSL if required to create your own look and feel.

We have produced four articles and screencasts that show you the Lightning Conductor Web Part in action. You will find a Getting Started Article, Rolling up Custom Columns, Rolling up Custom Content Types, and Applying Custom XSL. You can find all of these articles and screencasts in the support section of our web site.

We hope you find these useful.