Link to a document of shared document library

Question

My specifications:

Windows Server 2003
Visual Studio 2008
Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0
visual studio 2008 extension for Sharepoint services 3.0

I'm creating a web part with a SPGridView. I want one of the columns of the SPGridView to display links to documents of SharedDocumentLibrary.

How to read contents of SharedDocumentLibrary and display them as links in my webpart ?

I think we can achieve this through 'Link to Document' feature of SharePoint. But I don't know how? Can somebody give me some example.

My requirement is exactly this. Linking documents in SharePoint. How do I achieve it through source code ?

Answer 1

You could develop a web-part in Visual Studio which gets the list or document library you need and displays the content in a repeater or grid view, if you need an example of how that code might look, see this link.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/SharePoint-2010-101-Code-da251182

Loads of examples of how to acccess a list using the various ways you can do it..

1. Web services
2. JSON
3. Silverlight etc
4. Rest
5. Javascript

Hope this helps.

S

Answer 2

When I upload a file to Sharepoint, I save a record in my App's database with the file name and location, usually this will be in the format http://198.mySharepointServer/LibraryName/Filename.txt. This is then much easier and quicker than accessing Sharepoint programatically, running code and then retrieving the files url because you can just access a local database.

Similarly if you have the file's filename and you are only using 1 Sharepoint library the url shouldn't change so you can just use that url throughout and simply attach /filename.txt to the end of that url.

Here's a short extract of some code I used to retrieve the url programatically by searching with a document ID. Please note this was coded by a colleague so I just followed the logic, you can do the same and see what pieces you could use.

using (ClientContext spclient = new ClientContext(libraryUrl))
{
    CamlQuery query = new CamlQuery();
    try
    {
    libraryName = Properties.Settings.Default.Members;
    spclient.Credentials = creds;
    Web site = spclient.Web;
    List docList = site.Lists.GetByTitle(libraryName);

    spclient.Load(docList.Fields);
    spclient.ExecuteQuery();

    var filterList = new FilterOptionList();
    var DocID = new FilterOptions();
    AddFilters(spclient, docList, filterList, DocID, new string[] { DocumentID }, "Doc Ref No");

    StringBuilder q1 = new StringBuilder();
    q1.Append(CreateAndSection(filterList));
    queryString.Append(q1.ToString());
    queryString.Append("</Where></Query></View>");
    query.ViewXml = queryString.ToString();
    ListItemCollection collListItem = docList.GetItems(query);

    spclient.Load(collListItem);
    spclient.ExecuteQuery();

    if (collListItem.Count != 0)
    {
    spclient.Load(docList.Fields.GetByTitle("Doc Ref No"));
    spclient.ExecuteQuery();
    var DocRefNumColName = docList.Fields.GetByTitle("Doc Ref No").InternalName;

    foreach (ListItem item in collListItem)
    {
        if (item.FileSystemObjectType == FileSystemObjectType.File)
        {
        spclient.Load(item);
        spclient.Load(item.File);
        spclient.ExecuteQuery();

        domain = item.File.ServerRelativeUrl;
        if (domain != "")
        {
            DocumentURL = libraryUrl + domain;
            IsInMembers = true;
        }
        else IsInMembers = false;
        }
    }
    }                    
    } 
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        DocumentURL = "";
    }
}         

Please vote as an answer if this helped you.

Answer 3

In order to to add "Link to document" you need to do a couple things.

1) Turn ON the "Management of Content Types". This will be in the List/Library Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Allow management of content types? -> Yes

2) Add the content type "Link to a Document". You can go to your List/Library Settings and click Add from existing site content types -> select "Link to Document" then click Add.

3) You can now have a list/library item that links to another document! Go to your list/library and click New Document drop-down in the ribbon, then choose "Link to a Document"