Creating SharePoint List Views Dynamically

Creating SharePoint list view dynamically

I am back with yet another interesting topic. Interesting, for the people who are stuck and trying hard to achieve the objective. May be boring, for those who are working on something, who were never asked by their bosses to play with the Views. I created this solution because, I myself, got stuck once. Let me explain the problem. The problem (requirement) was to filter the view dynamically. What? That's easy! I knew you would say that. Filters can only be applied on a single field or a field that contains a text value. If I ask you to filter a view based on a column "Country", this column is a promoted column. It was promoted from an InfoPath form. The column itself was a repeating table inside the InfoPath form. If you know what I am talking about, then you know that repeating tables cannot be promoted as a field in SharePoint. I promoted the repeating table as a comma separated single value (If you want to know how, send me an email). Again the problem remains because filter cannot be applied on a field or column that has comma or a dot or whatever. I know its confusing. Let me give you an example. There is a SharePoint library called "Lib A" that has a column called "Country". It has two values, in fact, one value separated by a comma. The value is "USA". I am in another SharePoint site that has a link. The link simply points to the "Lib A" library. The link opens a filtered view of the library "Lib A". How do you do that? This is a separate question but I will give the answer here. You pass the filter in the URL. Because you are applying a filter dynamically, you will create the link to open the library "Lib A" dynamically also. Here is the code:

string link = "http://server/User%20Registration/Forms/AllItems.aspx?SourceType=Country=&FilterField1={" + filter + "}&FilterValue1=USA");

"SourceType=" is "Country" field. "FilterField1" is a GUID value of "Country" field. "FilterValue1" is the value that will be searched upon. We have passed "USA" as the parameter to this variable. This link will open a filtered view of the library and only items that have country as "USA" will be shown. So the question is from where do we get the GUID of the "Country" column. Here is the code to get the GUID:

SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site;
SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb();

SPList list = web.Lists["Conntries"];

SPFieldCollection fldCollection = list.Fields;

string filter = Convert.ToString(fldCollection["Country"].Id);

Cool. This link will show you a filtered view. Let's get back to the original problem. This approach worked because the Country contained a single value, something like USA or UK or Mexico but the approach would fail if the field had a value like "USA, UK, Mexico" The filter won't work in that scenario and the approach would fail. So the solution to this problem is to create a filtered view dynamically and clicking the link will open the newly created view. Note the difference in the two approaches. The first one is not creating a new view. It's applying a filter on an already created view. The second approach create a filtered view dynamically and then open that view. The second approach helps for the scenarios where a field has multiple values. As I said, I had a requirement once which involved promoting a repeating table and applying filter on that. The second approach gave me a perfect solution. The code to create the filtered view is as following:

SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site;
SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb();

SPList list = web.Lists["Countries"];

string CountryName = "USA";

SPViewCollection oViewCollection = list.Views;

int iExistingViews = list.Views.Count + 1;

string strViewName = "FilteredView" + iExistingViews;

System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection viewFields =

new System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection();

viewFields.Add("Type");
viewFields.Add("First Name");
viewFields.Add("Last Name");
viewFields.Add("Address");
viewFields.Add("Zip");
viewFields.Add("City");
viewFields.Add("State");
viewFields.Add("Country");
viewFields.Add("Phone");
viewFields.Add("Fax");
viewFields.Add("Web");

string query = "<Where><Contains><FieldRef Name=\"Country\"/>" +

"<Value Type=\"Text\">" + CountryName + "</Value></Contains></Where>";

oViewCollection.Add(strViewName, viewFields, query, 100, true, false);

web.Update();

string link = web.Url + "/" + list.Title + "/Forms/" + strViewName + ".aspx

That's it. This code will generate a link that will open the newly created view with a list of filtered items. The code is simple and self explaining. I will explain the logic briefly. "iExistingViews" contains the count of existing view in the library. We increment it by 1 and use it to give a name to our new view. So if you decide to name the view as "FilteredView", you can append the count + 1 to give the view a unique name. This is to make sure that view is not created with the name that already exists. So we append "FilteredView" with the count of existing views plus 1. If existing count is 2, the new name will be "FilteredView3". It's up to you which fields you want to show in the view. I included all the fields of the "user registration" library. "CountryName" variable contains "USA" (for testing). The following line adds the view:

oViewCollection.Add(strViewName, viewFields, query, 100, true, false);

The fourth parameter in the above function represents the number of items to show in the view. The link that is created in the end will open the filtered view of the library.