Customizing the Content Query Web Part

Whew!  That was a lot of work.  I'm still working on the Sentinel Event site.  We have a group of Lists and want to have a single web part display entries from all the lists in one place. 

 

We looked at a web part from Bamboo Solutions that does this, but a) it's not free, and b) there's a delay from when you add an item to when it appears in the web part.

 

I was able to get the same sort of thing working with a content query web part, but that only showed the Title of the document, and no other information.  I spent the morning seeing what I could do to improve on this.

 

Here are the instructions I used: http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/CustomItemStyle.aspx

 

To start with, you need to take your existing content query web part and export it.  Once you have the XML file, you need to customize one of the lines to pull in additional columns.  Here's the line in the WebPart you need to customize:

<property name="CommonViewFields" type="string">Title, Text;Date, DateTime;PublishingContactName, Note;Injury, Choice;Phone, Note</property>

Note the format, it's case sensitive, and the spaces have to be used as shown above.

 

Once your web part has been updated, you'll need to upload it to your Web Part gallery.  Once there, you'll be able to add the web part back to your page...and it won't look any different.  To display the new columns, you need to customize you CSS.  This is found in the file ItemStyle.xsl, which is held at the Site Collection level under Style Library...XSL Style Sheets. 

I just copied an existing template and added a table for formatting.

 

<xsl:template name="Andrew" match="Row[@Style='Andrew']" mode="itemstyle">

<xsl:variable name="SafeLinkUrl">

<xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetSafeLink">

<xsl:with-param name="UrlColumnName" select="'LinkUrl'"/>

</xsl:call-template>

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="DisplayTitle">

<xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetTitle">

<xsl:with-param name="Title" select="@Title"/>

<xsl:with-param name="UrlColumnName" select="'LinkUrl'"/>

</xsl:call-template>

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="LinkTarget">

<xsl:if test="@OpenInNewWindow = 'True'" >_blank</xsl:if>

</xsl:variable>

<div id="linkitem" class="item link-item bullet">

<table cellpadding = "5">

<tr>

<td> <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.CallPresenceStatusIconTemplate"/>

<a href="{$SafeLinkUrl}" target="{$LinkTarget}" title="{@LinkToolTip}">

<xsl:value-of select="$DisplayTitle"/></a>

</td>

<td><xsl:value-of select="@PublishingContactName" /></td>

<td>Phone: <xsl:value-of select="@Phone" /></td>

<td>Injury?: <xsl:value-of select="@Injury" /></td>

</tr>

</table>

</div>

</xsl:template>

 

Once you save the file and check it back in you can refresh the page and see your changes.  Hooray!

 

One note:  I ran into trouble early on because my column names contained spaces and special characters like '?'.  That made it hard to find the name that was used to reference the columns.  The linked site has a way to find these names...but that didn't work in my case.  I ended up renaming the columns.