Creating an item detail dashboard view of your joined lists in SharePoint 2010

Thanks to Stan for suggesting the idea for this post, by leaving a comment here.

Our goal here is to take your joined lists and display them on a single page, so you can effectively review an item and its associated information. This is a useful task for creating views of projects with many tasks, milestones, documents, or customers with contacts, documents, or products with updates, documentation, downloads. Really, anywhere a list that is linked (via a lookup field) to another list, this can be applied.

First, let’s assume the following: we have a parent list, and a few daughter lists which have lookup fields to the parent list.

Simple enough. In my example here, I am going to use a project theme. I have a Projects list, a Tasks list, and an Issues list.

Starting with the parent list, first let’s disable the popup dialog option. We can’t edit the pages in a dialog window, plus you’ll want a nice full page to view all your info. Go to the parent list, click List in ribbon > List Settings > Advanced settings. At the bottom of the page, Select No under Launch Forms in Dialog. Click OK.

Browse back to your project list and select one of your projects. You should see the nice generic page view.

Press Site Actions in the top right, then select Edit Page. The page will switch to edit mode. Now go ahead and add your lists you wish to join. In my case, I am going to add Tasks and Issues. Your new web parts will be added to the top of the page. Make sure to drag your web parts down so your project details remains at the top.

Once your web parts are added, edit each web part and set the Chrome Type (under Appearance) to Title and Border or Title Only, your choice. Make sure to click OK at the bottom of the edit web part panel to save your changes.

While we’re still in edit page mode, click the web part edit menu for your first web part (same place you went to edit the web part) and select Connections > Get Filter Values From > Projects.

A new dialog will appear.

For the Provider Field Name, select ID. For the Consumer Field Name, select the  lookup field, Project. Click Finish.

Your web part will be reloaded and filtered based on your project.

Perform these same connection steps for the other web parts on your page.

When you’re done, press Page ribbon, then Stop Editing. That’s it!

As you click and view each project, your tasks and issues will automatically filter for the selected project. Pretty sweet eh?

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Take it further!

• Edit the display form in SharePoint designer to add 2 columns to your page, allowing you to put additional web parts to the right of the details as well.
• Using color coded calendars, see my post here, you can create a calendar view of your tasks and projects, color coded based on status. Create a calendar view in each list, then when creating the color coded calendar, use these lists and views!
• Create a calendar for your tasks, color coded based on status, and add another web part to the above page to include the calendar!

Happy SharePointing!