SharePoint 2013 Using linked data sources for listview

SharePoint Designer offers the possibility to create datasource which can be linked in order to display a merged or combined view of the data sources. It’s a pretty cool function in order to create list views – but it was more comfortable with the SharePoint Designer with Preview. Anyway, this post covers a small example of those linked data source.

So in this post i want to give an example of how to deal with that. In creation time, we will come a point where the following question has to be answered that’s why i put it first;

Merge or Join?

Using linked data sources gives you two options: Merging or joining. But what is the difference? You should read this great post.

A merge is an interesting thing if your data sources have exactly the same columns – so you can sort, order or group on the data.

A join is useful if your lists or data sources are completely different but they have one column to combine (like Product ID) at least.

Well, after that let’s do some work. Let’s think about an easy scenario. Ok, we have two tasks lists. We want to see all tasks from both lists.

Step 1: Create a Datasource

At first we open SharePoint Designer an click on datasources. There we click on linked data source button and choose the lists we wanna linking, and their field afterwords. Give the datasource a cool name. By the way i choose join.

aggregateLists1

That’s our datasource.

Step 2: Create a Page

Now we go to site pages and create an aspx page. Between the formtag we add a dataview from our newly created data source.

aggregateLists2

After it has been created we delete the dataform webpart. In the right pane there is our data source. We choose the columns we want to have and add it as multiple items.

aggregateLists3