Missing the List View selector tool-bar drop-down menu in SharePoint 2010? Introducing the new List View Picker. - SharePoint Zen - ROXORITY ™ Sensational SharePoint Solutions
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Monday
May242010

Missing the List View selector tool-bar drop-down menu in SharePoint 2010? Introducing the new List View Picker.

In SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0, whenever you were on a List View page (or added a List View Web Part or List-bound Data View Web Part), you always got (or could easily enable) a nice out-of-box View selector drop-down in the List tool bar:

Switching Views was simply a one-click affair. In 2010, this is often no longer the case: you don't get an easy one-click View selector as soon as you add a second Web Part to the out-of-box View page, and you also don't get one when re-using the List as a Web Part on other pages. Instead you'll need to

  • click inside the List View to bring up the List Tools ribbon group with the List ribbon tab (click #1)
  • click the List ribbon tab (click #2)
  • and then pick the desired View from the Current View drop-down selector (in the Manage Views ribbon section).

However, even the 2007 View selector was a potential usability liability.

The fact is that all built-in View selectors in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 take the user to a completely different Web Part page, the View ASPX page (such as AllItems.aspx etc.) associated with the selected View. As soon as you have a few Web Parts interacting with your List View on the source page (such as Filter Web Parts or other Web Part Connections), the whole workflow context gets lost just by taking the user to the new View page. This is often not desirable:

  • first, you'd like to keep the states of all connections Web Parts for the current user intact and still let them switch to another View easily
  • secondly, you'd like to avoid having to replicate your full Web Parts setup on other additional View pages: for one, this will add a lot of manual effort to the otherwise simple process of adding a new View in the future, and also whenever the Web Parts setup needs to change ever so slightly in the future, again these changes need to be replicated manually on all other Views.

How to toggle between List Views with one click while staying on the same Web Part page in SharePoint 2007 and 2010:

Just use FilterZen (if you're not using it already). We just added a new feature that's simply called the List View Picker. Just drop a Filter Web Part on your Web Part page and add a single List View Picker filter, as demonstrated below — the important settings are highlighted:

With a setup like that, you immediately get a View selector drop-down that simply applies the selected List View to the connected List Web Part, without navigating to the View page and keeping the full current page state intact for your end-users:

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