Link List That Controls Another Web Part

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Occassionally folks will ask to have a list of links in one web part and have another web part display that content. There is a stupid HTML trick you can do to pull this off. This is one of those situations where it is nice to have required Internet Explorer.

Add two Content Editor Web Parts to the web part page.

In Web Part A add the following code:

<iframe name=”myframe” src=”http://www.msn.com”></iframe>

In Web Part B add the following code:

<li><a href=”http://www.microsoft.com” target=”myframe”>Microsoft</a>
<li><a href=”http://www.msn.com” target=”myframe”>MSN</a>
<li><a href=”http://msdn.microsoft.com” target=”myframe”>MSDN</a>

The net effect is that clicking a link in Web Part B causes it to display inside web part A.

If you want to get fancy, you can use a data view web part to render Web Part A from a list based on the Links list template, and modify the XSL to target the frame in Web Part B.

8 Comments

Assuming this is about Sharepoint 2003 (or even ASP.NET 2.0) - why don't you use connections to make this sort of thing possible?

Wilco - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:16:00 PM

Wilco, you definitely could create a web part that displays a page given a URL from a web part connection. The reason why you wouldn't want to do that is because this is faster and doesn't involve building and deploying said web part.

Westin - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 2:01:00 AM

Ian,

Is there some built in way to get the list web part to do this or are you modifying the XSL?

Westin - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 1:49:00 PM

I there any way to pass URL as a parameter to PageViewer WebPart

Sunil R. Warrier - Monday, May 3, 2004 11:40:00 AM

I tried your solution but it does not work. New page always opens up in new window:(

Muhammad Asif Siddiqui - Friday, June 25, 2004 2:02:00 PM

Make sure that the name of the IFRAME is correct in the target property in the source web part's A tag.

Westin - Friday, June 25, 2004 4:15:00 PM

Thanks! Much easier than creating a page viewer web part with a connection.

Dilip - Thursday, December 20, 2007 4:25:24 PM

Dear James Bruiner,

I try to create a solution to display .docx in IE and I found your post here.

Could you please tell me how your solution works I'm not be able to get this work...

And could you probably send me a demo of your solution?

That would be nice,

thanks in advance

Dirk

Dirk Schäfauer - Monday, March 22, 2010 1:57:46 PM

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