Long time reader, first time poster...
I have found many of the best solutions for my problems here, so thank you for all your hard work!
I have been trying to get this problem figured out for few weeks now with no success. I have a large SharePoint list that I need to filter and cannot find a good solution, and I have tried many! I'll get to the trial and error session in a minute. The request from my users is to be able to filter the list using multiple drop downs. Each of those drop downs can be picked in any order, so a traditional cascade filter such as "Country" --> "State" --> "City" is not applicable in this case. As stated earlier, the list is a rather large, a few thousand items, and the drop downs need to be populated from the list itself. Filtering from those drop downs should apply to entire list, not just the visible items. The total number of drop down filters is near 15.
So yes you can do all of this in the standard list view web part, but the number of columns is large and scrolling from left to right to get to the data that you looking for is not efficient. So the request is show only 6 columns in the list and then have the filters (15) in a column next to the list so that you can get to the items that you are looking for quickly without scrolling. I have been able to achieve this easily in Access, but seems to be almost impossible for me to find anything that I can use to get this to work. I have tried the following solutions without success:
InfoPath: There is no way that I have found to send wildcard data to the list, so if the drop down is blank, that is what is sent to the DVWP and rendered on the page. It does not show all the items in those columns as desired.
jQuery Datatables: Tried this and looks promising, but the filtering has to be either on top of the list or below and basically all the columns need to be visible to get the filtering to work. Again does not meet the request.
Data view web part Grouping Toolbar: I thought that this would have been the ticket, but from what I can see you can only use one of the filters at a time, where I need to use many.
jQuery Cascade drop down: I have looked into this but my javascript is rather weak and not sure how to pull it off with this many filters.
jQuery filtered drop down using list ID and view ID: I have tried this solution and it works, but it is agonizingly slow, but works the way I want it to. It is the only solution that hits the mark so far, but is the least efficient. Providing Filter Dropdowns for a SharePoint List/Library with jQuery
Any suggestions or leads would be most appreciated as I am lost as to where to go from here.