Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 31: Working with Web Parts 831
■ Area Details. Used to display area details such as description and contact
details. By default, this property is placed on many of the area Web Pages and
has custom properties to show the subtitle. It allows you to fix the image width
and height in pixels, and you can decide whether you want the picture of the
area’s contact to be displayed.
■ Grouped Listings. Used to display listings—that is, target items held within
a Portal Listings list. This Web Part is included in most area templates. This
might not be immediately obvious because the title for the Web Part when it is
included on area pages would be different or have no title at all. The custom
properties include Maximum Number Of Listings, Fixed Image Width And
Height In Pixels, Ignore Listings In Anchor Area, Subarea Layers, Display Template,
Group By, Sort Listings By, Sort Direction, Display Column, Highlights
Visibility, More Info Link Text Label, More Info Link URL, Description Trim
Size, and Show Subtitle. This Web Part also has two custom properties—
Cache Timeout and Cache Per User—which appear under the Miscellaneous
group heading. A Web Part can be designed to store frequently used data in
cache on a shared (all users) basis or on a per-user basis to expedite data
retrieval. If the data is to be stored in cache, you can also specify the timeout
value, which specifies the length of time during which the Web server should
retrieve the data from cache. If the time has expired, the Web server should reference
the data source, which could be the original .aspx file or the content
database. The data will then be copied into the cache and would be valid for
the timeout value specified. The Web Part cache can be configured to be either
held in memory or in an SQL database, on a Virtual Server basis, by configuring
the Web.config file; however, static Web Parts can use cache only if it is memory.
A decision on Web Parts and caching should be part of the design process
and involve both developers and administrators. For more information, see the
“Web Parts and Caching” topic in the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Windows
SharePoint Services SDK. Other Web Parts that are based on the Group
Listings Web Part and described in this chapter are News, News Area, Links For
You, and News For You.
■ News. This Web Part is placed by default on a portal site’s home page and
the News Web Part Page. It is based on the Grouped Listings Web Part—that is,
it will display links contained in the Portal Listing List and has the same custom
properties as stated earlier. The maximum number of Listings is set to five. This
Web Part uses the expanded display template and sorts listings by creation
date. If you place this Web Part on a different area page, it would not show the
items listed in the News Portal Listing list. To configure this Web Part to display
the News links, you would need to change the location Home > News by using
the link in the Current Area Override section, which is how this Web Part is
configured on a portal site’s home page.