Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 32: Using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 to Customize SharePoint Products 875
Changing List Grouping and Sorting to Make a Collapsible LVWP
Grouping list content is a great way to make a long list of data easier to navigate. For
example, if we had lots of announcements, we might want to group them by the
person who created the announcement. The LVWP could be displayed with each
group collapsed, and when we wanted to see the announcements that were created
by a certain person we would click on the plus sign (+), and the list of announcements
for that creator would expand. Similarly, we would click on the minus sign (–),
and the list of announcements for that creator would collapse.
To change the sort order of fields displayed in a list or document library
1. Right-click on the LVWP, and then click List View Properties to open the
Data View Details task pane.
2. Click the Sort & group link to open the Sort and Group dialog box. (See Figure
32-19, shown earlier in the chapter.)
3. Click fields you want to sort on first, and then click the Add button to add them
to the Sort order box. For our example, we want to add Created By to the
Sort order box.
4. Make sure that the Ascending option button is selected for each field you
want to sort against if you want the sort to go from lowest to highest, or that
the Descending option button is selected if you want the sort to go from highest
to lowest. The default value of Ascending will work for our example.
5. Because Group properties apply to all items in the Sort Order box, we need to
make sure that the fields are in the correct sequence. We don’t want to group
them by Modified Date and then group them by the Created By value. We
could reverse the order, but we really just want to remove Modified from the
Sort Order box. If we did want both fields, we could move the Created By field
to the first position in the Sort Order box by selecting Created By and clicking
the Move Up button. For our example, we just remove Modified by selecting
it from the Sort order box and clicking the Remove button.
6. Make sure that the Show group header check box is selected. It is not
selected by default, so we must select the Show group header check box.
7. Choose the default way to show each group’s content, expanded or collapsed.
By default, each group will be expanded and its contents will be visible. For
our example and for most applications of this option, you will want to select
the Collapse group by default option button.