The unprecedented growth of the global economy over the last decade, driven by a thirst for innovative ideas, has encouraged businesses to seek out new ways in which they can engage with the marketplace. An important part of this new approach is the representation of data in more meaningful ways, both in terms of the customers, as well as for the staff in order to optimise and improve their efficiency.

By default, SharePoint lists and libraries are used to store data consisting of fields, and are by-and-large accessible to any user with the required permissions. This may not necessarily be desirable, when storing sensitive information that one might wish to protect from end-users. Also, these lists are displayed in tabular formats, and sometimes there is a desire to break-out of this predefined mould. What if you only wanted to expose pertinent information? How could this be achieved using SharePoint technologies?

Using the default SharePoint XML web part, I will demonstrate how one might envisage leveraging the powerful rendering capabilties of Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), when used in conjunction with SharePoint lists and libraries built-in rss capabilties (Really Simple Syndication).

To show you just how easy it is to configure the XML web part, I am going to give you some background into how you can create you own simple, but attractive web part.

To start with, these are the components that were needed, which I have summarised as follows:

• A SharePoint List or Library

  I first created a custom list that would store all the relevant match information I wished to display. Once you have configured your list, the list’s views will be used to provide the source of the XML (Extensible Markup Language) data.

  
  
  
  
  

• A SharePoint XML Web Part

  This web part will be configured to read this view’s rss XML and by associated an XSLT file with it we will render the data in a stylish manner.

  
  
  

• XSLT file that will be utilised to transform the XSLT

  Using XSLT, we can manipulate the data returned by the XML to a high degree, and even use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to brand the web part according to our needs.

  
  
  

With these components in place, we are ready to begin the process of setting-up the environment, and configuring the XML web part.

Although the basics principles are easy to grasp, one should understand the importance of the necessary prerequisites if one wishes to leverage the full potential and impact of the XML web part.

Before commencing, one must first ensure that anonymous access has been activated at three levels:

• Web Application Level

  This can be accessed through the WSS Central Administration, and once activated allows for anonymous access to a site collection.

• Site Collection Level

  Advanced Permissions within a Site Collection can be modified to permit anonymous access to lists and libraries.

• List Level

  Only once anonymous access has been granted at the Web Application Level and the Site Collection level, can it be activated at the list Level through list permissions.

As soon as the environment has been configured for anonymous access, you can begin work on configuring the XML web part.

First, ensure that the XML web part contains the correct references to two important URL’s.

• The first is the XML Link, linking to the SharePoint list’s view rss feed.

• The other is the XSL Link that points to the XSLT file used to transform the XML data into a user-friendly manner, allowing for extensibility and a high degree of customisation.

In summary, and without going into too much depth, I hope that this has shed some light on how, using the SharePoint XML web part together with an XSLT style sheet to define how data is rendered, one can customise the format of list data, and build rich data-driven components, such as the “2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup’s Match-of-the-Day” below, where the original (but drab) list mentioned was the source of the data displayed in a now friendly and colourful fashion: