I have created a feature, a publishing site, in Visual Studio to MOSS – this feature contains a masterpage, some pages, some site columns (grouped to match each page) etc. I have also created a site collection, some sites and pages based on my template.
My next step is to create some definitions to contain very specific page content – therefore I have created a custom list template (a small extension to the custom list template) and from this template I have created a list and added some items to this list. On one of my pages I have a WebPart and to this WebPart I can add my list – so far so good. But how can I chance the design of how my items are shown when visitors a viewing the page? Right now they see a borring list but I wish to completely redesing this view?
Best Answer
Try the DataFormWebPart, it uses Xsl to render the resultset of an spdatasource.
Create the webpart using SharePoint Designer (just open the datasources tool in spdsigner, and drag the desired list's fields on a aspx file, which you can delete once the webpart is done), change the SPDataSource's select query to use the ListName instead of the ListId in the html source (so it stays portable / exportable) and then export the webpart.
You can even store the xsl in a separate file, maing it reusable for other webparts, allowing you to use a uniform rendering of similar webparts without recreating the styling etc. again everytime.