Web part filtering

Question

For our web site we would like to be able to have a combo box which the end user selects a “Province/State” from the drop down menu. Depending on which “Province/State” he selects, some web parts will be shown (content) and some parts will not be shown.. Is there any way to do this easily with Sharepoint?

My idea was to have some sort of global variables and have them turned true or false, depending on which ones are true/false, shows/hides certain web parts (content). Ideally we would like to have an abstract base class so that every time that we need a conditionally visible webpart, all that we need to do is to implement the condition.. However for now we tried to make a webpart that shows content depending on some query string parameter.. this is what we have..

public  class QueryStringTrimmedControl : ConditionallyVisibleControl  
{  
    public string Parameter { get; set; }  
    public string Value { get; set; }  

    public override bool ShouldBeVisible  
    {  
        get  
        {  
            bool shouldBeVisible = Page.Request.QueryString[ParameterName] == Value;  

            return shouldBeVisible;  
        }  
    }  
}

Can you inform/help me modify this to reflect web parts?

Thanks and please let me know if Sharepoint provides an easier solution.

Answer 1

Another option is JavaScript/jQuery on the client side. Depending on the selection, you just hide or show the Web Parts with the script. This will be a much better user experience than a postback.

Answer 2

Have you considered global audiences? You could create a global audience in your SSP based on a field in Active Directory that contains their state. Then you can set the web parts to display to those audiences. It would be a little more dynamic, because your users would not have to make a selection for the content to display.

Answer 3

How many possible combinations of visible web parts do you have? If it's not too many, I would consider creating web part pages for each combination of visible web parts and only add those web parts to that page.

All you then need is a web part that performs the redirection to the right web part page when the selected item in the dropdown contained in that web part changes.

If you don't want to create all those web part pages, you could consider writing your own web part base class that sets this.Visible = false if a certain condition is true (e.g. read from querystring) as you suggested yourself. You could have the state/province select dropdown redirect to the current page with the appropriate querystring parameter like

mypage.aspx?hidewebparts=wptitle1,wptitle2,wptitle3

Answer 4

We've decided to take the path of creating a global variable to deal with the issue.. however I am not very experienced with sharepoint, where would we create the global variable to work in the session and how would we implement the code to show/hide web parts into sharepoint. meaning how would we import it/where?

thanks again for all the awesome suggestions and help.