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How-to: Display Contents of a SharePoint List From Another Site

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THX to: Jan Tielens' Bloggings [MVP]
Some people are wondering if it’s possible to display the contents of a SharePoint list that resides on another SharePoint site. Yes this is possible, even better: I’ll show you how to accomplish this! Suppose you have a SharePoint Task list on your root site that contains some tasks. You also have a sub site on which you want to display the contents of the Task list of the root site. First of all you need to create the Task list on the root site of course.

Next create the sub site, if you haven’t create it yet. We’re going to use FrontPage 2003 to accomplish our task, so fire up FronPage 2003 and open the sub site. We want to display the tasks on the start page of that site, so open default.aspx as well. From the Data menu choose the “Insert Data View…” menu item. In the Data Source Catalog task pane you’ll see a list of available data sources on the current site (Sub Site), of course the tasks are not in that list. On the bottom of the task pane, click “Manage catalog…”, a new window is displayed in which we can enter additional data sources. Click the Add button and enter the url of the root site as location, and choose a description for this data source. Close the window by clicking the OK button. Now you can use the task pane to browse to the data sources located on the root site!

Finishing off is very easy: drag and drop the task list from the Data Source Catalog to the web part zone, that’s it. If you want to you can alter the view (e.g. add or remove some columns), when you’re done don’t forget to save the page. The result is that you have a nice formatted web part that shows the tasks from a list on another site:

As you can see data sources are very powerful in FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint. This time we've used a SharePoint list as a data source, but you can use several other types of datasources for example web services. Don't underestimate the power of FrontPage 2003! :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2005
    Is it possible to have a lookup field referencing a list in another site?

    I wanted to have a centralised list of document categories, and then each of my document libraries in our SPS site could have a lookup field referencing the centralised list. It didn't seem possible from what I could see - or did I miss something?

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2005
    Can you use different authentication for the look-up? That is the user has only rights to the sub-site but not the main site. The view in the sub-site will be a filtered view based on the user.

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2005
    Great feature.

    I tried to apply this feature between two different Sharepoint sites which don't reside on the same server. Somehow ony the Database connections, XML Files, Server Side Scripts and XML Web Services are displayed and not the libraries. Do you have experience with displaying does?

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2005
    This is really cool feature, but can you link together data from similar list into a master list. For example, we want department calendar and a master calendar that contains all the events from every department in the organization.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    But after the new page (with the data view) is created with FP 2003, the page becomes unghosted and therefore changes to the site definition will not apply to the page. Any way around this issue?

  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2006
    Its not Possible in Sharepoint Designer 2007. Can u help me ?

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2007
    This technique does not appear to work with calendars - which are a special kind of list with some restrictions. Yes, it works with Sharepoint Designer 2007

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2008
    Did you get this to work for libraries, i.e. non-lists.  I tried repeating these steps for a document library and it seemed to work, but all of the columns are messed up, i.e. it doesn't look like a document library.

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2008
    Hello Danny I am also facing same problem as you mentioned below in your earlier post? I tried to apply this feature between two different Sharepoint sites which don't reside on the same server. Somehow ony the Database connections, XML Files, Server Side Scripts and XML Web Services are displayed and not the libraries. Do you have experience with displaying does? Has anyone resolved this? Ani

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2008
    Hello I wonder if you can do this with Prpoject Tasks? As I'd like to create a dashboard that can display a Project Tasks Lists from another site.

  • Anonymous
    July 24, 2008
    Hi, I'm using SharePoint Designer 2007 and I can load the Lists from the other site, but I can't add those lists to the aspx file Am I missing something?

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2009
    Hi, Can we do this with SharePoint designer 2007? I can connect to the library but can not select items... Please help!

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2009
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