The Web Part Gallery in C#.NET

Print Quick Response Code in C#.NET The Web Part Gallery

Figure 2.2 The Central Administration in SharePoint contains a Health Analyzer that analyzes the current state of the farm. If any critical errors are found, the Health Analyzer uses the status bar to notify administrators.

You choose Web Parts from the Web Part Gallery, which you ll find in the Ribbon menu when editing a page. The gallery is a site collection-based library that contains information and metadata about the Web Parts that are available to end users in that specific site collection. The gallery is used to publish the Web Parts that you build or install so that your users can select the Web Parts they want. Using the gallery or directly importing Web Parts is the only way for users to add Web Parts to a page. Each site collection has its own gallery; you can access a gallery by choosing Site Settings and, under the Galleries section, clicking on Web Parts. SharePoint displays a list of all the available Web Parts in the gallery (see figure 2.3). Not only does the Web Part Gallery host the Web Parts but it also contains metadata about how Web Parts are organized in groups as well as permissions for Web Parts. As a developer, you can deploy your default Web Part configuration into the gallery, and the site collection administrator can, at any time, change the configuration of any Web Part in the gallery. In this section, I ll walk you through the gallery so that you ll know where your Web Parts are deployed and how they can be used and configured after deployment.

Figure 2.3 The Web Part Gallery contains all installed Web Parts for the current site collection and is used to locate and add Web Parts to pages.

What is the Web Part Gallery The Web Part Gallery is a special catalog created by SharePoint to host the site collection s Web Parts. When users are building Web Part pages using either the browser or SharePoint Designer, they pick the Web Parts they need by selecting them from the gallery. The gallery doesn t contain the compiled Web Part assembly; it s simply a list of Web Part items with metadata columns and a file attachment that contains a Web Parts control description file. This file contains the default value used by any created instance of the Web Part as well as the reference to the assembly and Web Part class. All Web Parts can also have a group value, which is used for organizing and grouping the Web Parts. The Web Part Gallery contains a set of preconfigured templates for Web Parts that editors can choose from. When you re adding a Web Part to a page, the Web Part properties are copied from the control description file to the page. If you later go back and edit the Web Part in the gallery, this change won t affect Web Parts that have already been added. 3 will show you what the Web Parts control description file looks like and how it works. When I talk about Web Parts in the Web Part Gallery, I m referring to the definition and configuration of a Web Part. That s also what end users are referring to when they talk about Web Parts. When a developer talks about a Web Part, they re most often talking about the Web Part class existing in an assembly. When working with pages programmatically, you don t have to use only the Web Parts listed in the gallery you can use any Web Part that you create through code. This topic will be discussed further in chapter 15 when we explore building pages and dashboards. If you re adding Web Parts to a page, you also have access to a special group called Lists and Libraries. This category contains the XSLT List View Web Parts (see section 2.3.1) configured for all available lists and libraries in the site and shows a view of the selected list.