SharePoint and the magic of query strings

By -
One of typical requests from users is the ability to have a page open in a certain state, where things automagically appear and happen by themselves.

Throughout my travels, I have come by many of these magic strings of text that we put into the url bar and something amazing happens, some of these not even accessible - at least easily - through the user interface.

My goal with this post is to lay down some of these bad boys, who they are and what they do.


Old but gold, open the "Web Part Page Maintenance"

Query: ?contents=1

Result: opens a page with all the web part instances, effectively allowing us to manage (close, delete, etc.) web parts and very useful to troubleshoot problematic web parts

Go into the current page's edit mode

If - for whatever reason - you need to open a page in edit mode, you can add this one.

Query: ?ToolPaneView=2

Result: page opens automatically in edit mode

Open a view in quick edit mode

We can open up a view already in quick edit mode without users having to click List > Quick Edit.

Query: ?ShowInGrid=True

Result: opens a view in quick edit (datasheet) mode for editing items in place

Open a view with headings as filters

List view fields can be used to filter out items, but this is not shown by default.

Query: ?filter=1&filterclear=1

Result: filter will enable the fields as filters and filterclear will ensure that the filters persist through out the session

Filtering views with advanced query strings

This is by far the most helpful and flexible query string mechanism available in list views. So much so that I will need to have sub-categories for them:

Filtering a single field with a single value

Query: ?FilterField1=Country&FilterValue1=Portugal

Result: returns results with Portugal as country


Filtering multiple fields and with single values


Query: ?FilterField1=Country&FilterValue1=Portugal&FilterValue2=City&FilterValue2=Lisbon

Result: returns results with Portugal as Country and Lisbon as City


Filtering a single field with multiple possible values


Query: ?FilterName=Country&FilterMultiValue=Portugal;United States of America

Result: returns results where the country is either Portugal or USA


Filtering a single field with multiple possible values using wildcards


Query: ?FilterName=Country&FilterMultiValue=*ortuga*;*states of ameri*

Result: returns results where the country is either Portugal or USA, while specifying only a subset of the string we want to search for


Now let's put them all together

Query: ?Filter=1&FilterField1=Country&FilterValue1=Portugal&FilterValue2=City&FilterValue2=Lisbon&FilterName=Subject&FilterMultiValue=*human resources*;*procurement*

Result: This url will enable headings as filters, it will query results with Portugal as Country and Lisbon as City, and it will also look for results where the Subject contains either human resources or procurement


Further reading:

Connect a Filter Web Part to a List View Web Part on a classic page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking down document locking in SharePoint

By -
Image
This is a topic I've been meaning to discuss in a while. We open, change and close documents almost every day, and sometimes we collaborate with other people at the same time on those documents. SharePoint brings all co-authoring features we need, straight out-of-the-box, but sometimes, there are problems. While things are starting to look better on the cloud side, the concept of document locking is still very much up-to-date and understanding how it works and what to do when things go wrong is crucial. In an article that has since disappeared the Microsoft Knowledge Base (but still available here ), Microsoft explains it best: When a document is opened by a client program, Windows SharePoint Services puts a write lock on the document on the server. The write lock times out after 10 minutes. Users cannot modify the document during the time when the document is locked. In a scenario where the program that opens the document unexpectedly quits or crashes and you try to open the do...
Read more

Working around X-Frame-Options for iframes

By -
Image
The problem: One of the first things we noticed after migrating to SharePoint 2013 was that our iframes have stopped working, giving the error: "Refused to display 'http://contoso/pages/home.aspx' in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to 'SAMEORIGIN'." Quickly we could see that this is in fact a security mechanism to prevent click-jacking and others: "The X-Frame-Options HTTP response header can be used to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page in a frame or iframe. Sites can use this to avoid Clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites." Soon we realized that, starting SharePoint 2013, an HTTP Module is adding the header " X-Frame-Options " by default, with the value " SAMEORIGIN ". This is effectively preventing the rendering of pages outside the scope of the current web application. The (attempted) solution: So what to do?...
Read more

Document ID not being generated

By -
Image
Problem In a scenario where we have many document Content Types, we may want to enable Document ID - aka "Permanent Links" - which is a feature in SharePoint that assigns a specific ID for each document. That ID never changes even if the document is renamed or moved to another location. In this scenario, the Document ID field was being generated for some libraries/content types, but not others, which is a surprisingly common problem. Background There are several stages we need to go through to enable use this mechanism. Stage 1 We enable the feature in the Site Collection Features. Stage 2 Under Site Collection Administration > Document ID Settings, we need to enable the assignment and pick a prefix. The IDs use the format: PREFIX-LISTID-LISTITEMID ( ref ) Where: PREFIX: the preconfigured prefix for the site collection, which can be any set of numbers and letters between 4-12 characters LISTID: the property docid_msft_hier_listid of the list...
Read more