Customizing the content query web part (CQWP)

This is a pretty simple one, but people tend to ask about it a lot. One of the most powerful Web Parts built in to MOSS is the Content Query Web Part (affectionately known as the CQWP). This Web Part allows you to roll up content from any and all lists in the current site and all subsites and display in a custom format. If you have never played with it, you should go try it out. You can specify a content type to pull from multiple lists, sort, filter etc...

The greatest thing about the CQWP is that the data comes back as XML and gets displayed using the XSLT in the Style Library (ItemStyle), you can modify this XSLT or point it at your own file to pretty much roll up data in any way you need. This is a great solution to any client that wants you to "write us a web part to display some list data" because it is already written for you and the performance (even when accessing large lists) is pretty much as good as it gets (check out http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=95450&clcid=0x409 for reference).

The one thing to remember to do is include your custom list columns in the CQWP properties via the .webpart file. There are some good tutorials on doing this (and other property customizations) from MSDN and on Heather Solomon's blog.

About

Hi everyone,

So I wanted to have a quick intro post about who I am and my (at least initial) purpose for this blog… My name is Ely and I work in a large enterprise environment as a “Solutions Developer” which really equates to an Information System’s architect, solution designer, developer, and all around technical “guru”. My main focus is helping users in the business design and build solutions on our enterprise SharePoint platform that consists of the full Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) + Enterprise Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) goodness.

As for this blog, in the never ending learning experience that is SharePoint I seem to keep running into problems, oddities and general “how do I do this?” questions that are not well document or the answers are hard/impossible to find. I plan to use this blog as a place to help others who may have run into the same problems/oddities/”How do I do it” questions that I have run into so they don’t have to go through the same grueling process that I did to solve them.

Please feel free to email me with any comments/feedback you may have or with any problems you would like me to look in to!

-Ely