Project Description
Microsoft offers a nice selection of out of the box filters for filtering dashboards, but they are somewhat limited when it comes to real-world use.

The Hosted User Control Feature provides a way to easily create custom filters to avoid these limitations.

SUMMARY

Hello and welcome to another edition of Developer’s Notes. In this edition, we will be discussing Filtering Web Parts for use with the SQL Server Reporting Services Viewer control in MOSS. These filters give users the ability to create dynamic dashboards of information that can be filtered based on business data. Several options are available out of the box; however, these items do not fit many of the paradigms generally used by developers, such as populating data for drop down lists based on a web service or SQL call. In addition, these filters do not offer any styling options to allow them to fit with the look and feel of the customer’s portal.

THE OUT OF THE BOX FILTERS

As mentioned in the summary, there are several out of the box filters that are available when you have the MOSS enterprise edition installed. Note, these are ONLY available when you have the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL or for Internet Site. This is an important note, which we will discuss further in the custom filters section below.

Business Data Catalog Filter
This filter will provide a means to search a business data catalog for values in a typically “SharePoint” way, with a text box for input as well as an available search dialog.

Choice Data Filter
This filter provides a sort of popup dialog that allows the user to pick a single value based off of a list of strings. This is a fairly flexible setup, allowing the developer to enter in exactly what should be allowed for filtering. The down side; however is that this is a manually entered list that obviously is not going to be able to adjust to changing business data.

Current User Filter
This filter is a context based filter that will return the username of the currently logged in user.

Date Filter
This is a simple date control that takes advantage of the SharePoint calendar control to allow the user to pick a date for a report.

Page Field Filter
This filter will return the value of a published field from the page it is connected to, such as Content Type, Created, Title, etc.

Query String (URL) Filter
This filter will redirect the value from a query string parameter as a filter value. This is useful for pre-populating report filters based on URLs

SharePoint List Filter
This allows the designer to tie a popup selection window, similar to the Choice filter, to a SharePoint list. There are some limited settings available which allow the designer to pick the display and value columns from a content type in a list view.

SQL Server Analysis Services Filter
This control allows the designer to pull data from either a KPI Web Part or directly from an SSAS cube.

Text Filter
This simple text box filter allows a user to filter based on free-form text.

As you can see, this is a nice selection of items, but it is somewhat limited in scope of what many clients might want to have available for their filters. Many would want to be able to adjust the look and feel of their filtering while also providing direct data from web services and SQL. None of those options are supported by Microsoft at this time. In addition the entire feature set is dependent on the purchase of a rather expensive CAL that some customers may not be able to afford. The solution to these challenges is to build custom filters.

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