Monday 11 August 2008

SharePoint List Filter - Making it work

The SharePoint List Filter is a webpart which offers nice out of the box filtering benefits especially when linking lists to each other (using Lookups) or otherwise.

Strangely, its not extremely straightforward to use and I had been getting the following error over and over again much to my disappointment:

"An error occurred while retrieving the filter values. One or more columns used for the filter does not exist."

The error is not very enlightening although it does offer a hint to why the problem might be occurring. The column used to display. The issue I was having is that I was using the Filter List View as the column for the filter, and choosing the Title. By default the Title column is linked to the Context Menu which causes the filter to screw up. So how do you solve it?

Create a new List, based on the Title, however link to Title only, not the Title with a link to the Context Menu. Create the filter based on this view and it will all work nicely :)