AWG Blogs

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Sort DataFormWebPart by "Order" Field

The only way I know to do this SPD 2007 is through some manual steps. BTW, the "order" field is determined by the action taken by user, which is made available via the "Allow users to order items in this view?" option for the view.

There are actually a couple of ways:

- Drag your list from the Web Part List from the Web Parts Task pane onto a web part zone.
- Then right click on web part and "Convert to XSLT Data View" which will convert the ListViewWebPart to DataFormWebPart with all the desired attributes (such as sorting) preset.

Alternately, if you created the web part as a Custom List Form from the start (i.e. with XSLT embedded), then you can edit the CAML manually.

- First open Common Data View Tasks and set it to sort by a common field such as ID.
- Then edit the SPDataSource SelectCommand, by changing "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name="ID"" to "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name="Order""