The following section describes methods you can use to customize your dashboard site, including creating custom Web Parts, creating Web Parts from documents created in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint® or creating additional dashboards and importing or exporting Web Parts. This section provides procedures for each of these tasks.
After you open the project in the Office XP Developer environment, you can customize the dashboard site by adding new Web Parts.
A Web Part can contain any kind of Web-based information. To add Web Parts to a dashboard project, use the Add New Item command. By using this command, you can add an HTML, Microsoft JScript®, Microsoft Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript), or Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web Part to the dashboard project.
When you add a Web Part, Office Developer associates a standard set of properties with the Web Part. To view the properties of a Web Part in the Properties Window, select the Web Part in the Solution Explorer.
If the Properties Window is not visible, click the Properties icon in the Solution Explorer to make it visible or select the Properties Window from the View menu.
You can add content to your Web Part using two fundamental coding practices for SharePoint Portal Server:
By following these naming conventions, you can write functional and reusable Web Parts.
In this example, you will add content to the HTML Web Part created in the previous procedure. You can edit some properties for the Web Part and display an image in the Web Part.
You also can do this by changing the Name property of Folder1 to Part_Files.
You must change the filter Files of type: to All Files (*.*) to see the resources.
Your code should look like this:
<HTML><BODY> <!— Do not edit anything above this comment —> <h1>Hello World</h1> <img src="/books/2/912/1/html/2/_WPR_\Logo.gif"> <!— Do not edit anything below this comment —> </BODY></HTML>
You can use this procedure to add resources of other types. You can preview the dashboard using your Web browser.
Office XP provides an easy way to create custom Web Parts for your workspace. You can create a Web Part by saving a document as a Web page into a SharePoint Portal Server workspace folder.
http://server_name/workspace_name/Portal/Web_Part_name.htm
A subdashboard is a digital dashboard that is a child of a parent digital dashboard. You can add subdashboards to your dashboard site to organize the content that you want to display using different levels and sections. You can merge subdashboards and any related dashboards into a single navigation bar by setting the MergeSubDashboards property to True. The navigation bar appears under the title bar of the subdashboard. SharePoint Portal Server optimizes the format of the navigation bar to handle a single root dashboard with one level of child dashboards.
After creating a subdashboard, you can specify the dashboard properties and add Web Parts to it as you would with any other dashboard.
SharePoint Portal Server is considered a schema-capable data source. You can export and import Web Parts from SharePoint Portal Server to different data sources such as a computer running Microsoft Exchange 2000 computer or a computer with a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 dashboard. For more information about exporting Web Parts to different data sources, see Chapter 23, Deploying Digital Dashboards to Multiple Stores.
When you save a Web Part as XML, Office Developer describes the Web Part in XML format. This stores Web Parts and dashboards independent of the schema-capable data source. XML is a universal format for representing Web Parts and dashboards. It enables the transfer of definitions between different storage platforms. Using this format, you can store definitions in the file system or exchange them among applications. After you click Save, Office Developer saves your Web Part and its properties as an XML document with a DWP extension (.dwp). Office Developer also saves any resources associated with the Web Part to a folder you specify as part of the Save As DWP command. The following steps describe how to export the Web Part that you created in the earlier example.
When in XML format, a Web Part can be exchanged outside operating systems that manage Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) properties. Office Developer saves these files in *.dwp format, so there is a common way of representing Web Parts saved as an XML document. When you receive a Web Part as a *.dwp file, you can easily import it into a dashboard. You can import the Web Part to a digital dashboard on a computer running Exchange 2000, SQL Server 2000, or another computer running SharePoint Portal Server. In addition, Office XP Developer provides a catalog of Web Parts. To import a Web Part from this catalog, perform the following steps.
This adds the Web Links.VBS Web Part to the workspace. Notice that importing the Web Links.dwp added a Web Links.VBS Web Part and a Web Links_Files folder to the workspace. The Web Links_Files folder contains the resources for the Web Links Web Part.
You can preview your dashboard at any time by using your Web browser.