Little SharePoint 2010 Gem: AJAX Options in List View Web Parts
Guest Author: Jan Tielens
Last week I stumbled upon some pretty neat functionality of the out-of-the-box List View Web Part in SharePoint 2010: the AJAX Options. When you add a Web Part from the List and Libraries category (that basically shows you every List and Document Library you have on the SharePoint site) behind the scenes the Data View Web Part is being used to display the List or Document Library data.
When you edit such a Web Part once it has been added to a page, you’ll notice there is a new AJAX Options section in the Web Part properties. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and is a web development technique to build more interactive, rich web sites. The AJAX Options are disabled by default, but by enabling you can get some pretty cool results:
- Enable Asynchronous Update: enabling this option will make paging, sorting, filtering work without full page refreshes.
- Show Manual Refresh Button: enabling this option will show an icon to allow the user the refresh the data manually, once again without refreshing the rest of the page.
- Enable Asynchronous Automatic Refresh: when enabled, the Web Part will dynamically refresh the date it’s showing, without completely reloading the page. The interval can be specified in the textbox below.
- Automatic Refreshing Interval: specifies the interval used in the previous option.
- Enable Asynchronous Load: when enabled, the Web Part will initially be displayed without any data in it. But once the page is loaded, the Web Part will asynchronously fetch the data afterwards. When the data is being loaded, the Web Part will display an animation. This option will speed up the initial page load.
This article was originally published on Jan’s blog.
Guest Author: Jan Tielens
Jan Tielens is a.NET Architect and Trainer at U2U. He focuses on Information Worker technologies including SharePoint and Office.
Jan is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Office SharePoint Server and he is well known in the SharePoint community as the author of the SmartPart. You can read his weblog at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan and follow him via twitter at http://twitter.com/jantielens.
I am looking for a cheap or free ajax document viewer control, I can use in .net, DNN?
Pass it a path by URL or FILE to a pdf, word, etc and display it.
Thanks for the informational article. When I enable the Enable Asynchronous Load option on announcements list and save the webpart property the option gets automatically deselected. Am I missing some settings? I am trying to use this option to improve page load performance. Thanks for your help.
This is a by design behavior when any listview web part is associated with an internal or regular sharepoint list. If it has some External Data Source it needs to pull data from, then this option will be enabled and applicable. If the Web Part is a SPList, it will always return a “false” or “unchecked” checkbox.
When I check the Show Manual Refresh checkbox, I see it, in an awkward place all the way over to the right of the list in SharePoint Designer. But, when I save and exit Designer and browse the page, that button is not there at all. Any hints? What I really want is to have a button with a text label in a different part of the page refresh the list, when I change some filtering parameters in form fields nearby.