Displaying Document Libraries in other sites

A client recently asked for a modification to Business Portal - Requisitions Management. They wanted to post a library for supporting documentation (quotes, product spec sheets, etc.). The problem is that they wanted it visible in both the Employee Purchase Request entry screen and the Purchasing Requisitions management screen and these pages are in two entirely separate sites.

As you may know, SharePoint is great at showing content from all the libraries you set up....as long as they are within the same site. Site A has no clue that Site B even exists.

The key for this solution came down to using the Page Viewer web part. This web part allows you to display another website within a window on another page.

The next challange is that SharePoint pages all include navigational borders and headers. When you display a SharePoint page within another page, all this flotsam is included, making a really confusing page. Here's how I worked around this issue.

Step 1: Setup your document library. Because I wanted to make sure that all users could get to the library, I set it up in the main Business Portal site. You can add permissions to the library if you need to in order to keep the right people in and the wrong ones out. Add any custom fields you might need to help find your documents more quickly. In this case, I added a mandatory Requisition ID field and an optional description field.

Step 2: Create a view for the document library that only shows the columns you'll want displayed on the other page.

Step 3: Create a new blank page that we'll use to display the document library in a web part. We'll be adding code to hide all of the navigational elements, so we don't want to do this on a page that's needed for something else. In this case, I went to the Business Portal Common Pages library and added the new page there, calling it RequisitionDocs.aspx

Step 4: Add the document library web part to the page.

Modify the web part to your liking. For me, I like to remove the ability of the user to do anything bad, like deleting the web part, moving it around, etc. I put it there for a reason, now you leave it alone! :) You'll also want to either have no title showing or show the title only. Select the view for the document library that you created above.

Step 5: Add another web part - the Content Editor web part. This is where we'll hide everything else on the page like the borders, the header...all that junk. In the content editor page, paste the code found on this page: http://vspug.com/spfromscratch/2007/12/18/blank-page/

NOTE: Take the "*" characters out of the word "java*script and don't forget the colon after the work "java*script"

As soon as you save the content, the page should change dramatically. If you're brave, you can remove the link at the bottom. Just remember though that you need a way to get back into edit mode so DON'T hide all your titlebars!

Step 6: Now that we have the page built that we want to display, we can link to it from our source pages. Edit the page where you'd like to display the library and add the Page Viewer web part. Modify the web part and add the url to your document library to the Link field. In this case, the URL would be http://dynamics-web/BP/Business%20Portal%20Common%20Pages/RequisitionDocs.aspx

Adjust the web part to be the way you want it on the page and Viola!

To take it further, the list view that I created had title that you could click on which then loaded the document library in my web part...bringing back all the navigational nastiness. To get around this, change the titleurl field in the document library on the display page (requisitiondocs.aspx). Instead of pointing to the document library, use the hash character instead (#).

Another problem is that in the default views for the document library, there's an "Add new document link" that again loads a full page for uploading documents. Sheesh, I try to get out and they keep pulling me back in! To get around this, edit the document library web part on your display page and change the toolbar type to "No Toolbar".

I have quite a few sources to thank for this, most of all is the code for hiding the nav elements. I found it posted on this page - http://vspug.com/spfromscratch/2007/12/18/blank-page/

The tip for hiding the Title URL was found here - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomization/thread/ac235b36-b516-40d3-bd2d-ea7dccd8eef1 and the tip on hiding the "Add new document" link was found here - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomization/thread/9561ff37-bd33-44ec-be45-82f0fcd868db