You can use SPD 2010 to achieve the following:
• Customize the look and feel of the application.
• Create and manage data sources such as lists.
• Create views and forms to work with the data sources.
• Create custom workflows.
You look at the first three items in this hour. Workflows were already covered in Hour 15, “Understanding SharePoint 2010 Workflows.”
Often the default master page is not sufficient to address all your needs. Suppose you are creating a SharePoint site for a client, and you have to change the branding based on client requirements. SPD 2010 provides a lot of functionalities to help you address all your UI needs. The following sections look into some of the commonly used UI functionalities in SPD.
You already learned about master pages in Hour 7, “Understanding SharePoint 2010 Server Side Development.” You now look at modifying master pages in SharePoint Designer 2010.
SharePoint allows the creation of data sources from the designer itself. The most common sources of data in SharePoint are list and libraries. SharePoint has some generic templates for creating basic lists such as Announcements, Tasks, and so on. You also have the option of creating custom lists.
This section explains how you can edit the site layout using SPD 2010. To edit site layouts, first begin by making a copy of your home page. In this example, change the position of Add Document under the Shared Documents web part, as shown in Figure 19.5.
Site columns are a fundamental element of SharePoint 2010. These are defined at the site level once and can be reused again and again.
You just created a new site column named Picture whose scope is the site splearn. You can use this site column throughout the site wherever you need a picture to be embedded in a list.
You learned about content types in Hour 12, “Enterprise Content Management—Understanding Document Management.” SPD 2010 also allows you to create new content types, and these can be added to lists and libraries at the site level. A content type created at a site level is accessible throughout the site/site collections.
A data view web part allows you to display data from SharePoint lists with filtering, grouping, and desired formatting. You can add a DataView web part to a page through SPD 2010.
The DataView web part comes with built-in filtering capabilities. In this section you see how you can add filtering to your DataView web part: