Sharepoint MSS 2007 - Filtering mulitple inputs

Question

I am building a directory tool that will list entries for technical support contacts and listed by its appropriate company. My end goal is to allow end users to be presented with 2 simple inputs, a drop down with the list of companies and a text input to enter the name of the technical team they would like to reach. Sharepoint has made this a nightmare.

Since my server is on MSS 3.0 I decided to use a form webpart where I have added created the 2 input (dropdown and text input). I made the parameters to point to the input and added them to the filters and finally made the webpart connection.

I was able to get as far as making a sucessful filter for the technical team but as soon as I try to filter by client the results are very sporadic and mostly incorrect. I play around with the list filter in Sharepoint designer 2007 tried to group the filters together, tried changing the AND/OR in every possible setting but no luck.

Decided to push it by creating a column named blank that basically had empty values. The idea behind that was to allow end user to leave the technical team input blank and show all entries for the company. I thought somehow it would have maybe solve my sporadic issue but instead made it more complex.

At this point I can probably live without being able to search with blank results but I need to be able to at least filter by company and technical teams. At this point any sort of help is appreciated, been at this for a few weeks and my project is due last week so I am pretty much desperate to solve this problem.

Answer 1

For those that may have a similar problem I have found a work around to this problem. I decided to use the ASP.net User Control and this works much better than the form webpart and provides much better results.

Here a link that I found which help me get me on the track:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/03/05/asp-net-controls-filter-the-data-view.aspx