Visualizing Content Types with Canvas
This is so cool. When I saw some of the cool demos for the InfoVis toolkit, I wanted to try one out with SharePoint data.
I decided to use Content Type data since it has a parent-child relationship. If you didn’t know, all Content Types have an ID. These IDs reveal the inheritance path of the Content Type (and System begot Item who begot Document and Document begot…).
Since this was only a test, I generated a baseline of Content Type data from our test server using SPD, a Data View Web Part, and the Web.asmx web service. If people are interested, I can walk through those steps. For now, just check out this demo (works best in something other than IE because IE does not support CANVAS tags natively).
With this test, I have a good idea of what’s involved to do this dynamically. The next phase involves getting SharePoint’s Content Types organized into the right format dynamically.
Paul,
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve already shared it with my development team to see what we might be able to do with it.
Chris
@Chris,
I’ll send you the files. Let me know if your team figures out a way to programmatically build the JSON file. That’s the part that needs some help.
This does look very interesting. Look forward to more information on this!
I’d like to use something like this to better demonstrate the sprawl that has been created in some sites at work.
What, no Publishing Page content types? ;p Very cool. Could it do things like colouring the nodes based on Group?
And yup, I’d be interested in seeing how it works. Something like that, or a tree view of Site Content types would be useful.