I’ve been doing a lot of work in SharePoint recently – nothing very technical, just Site Administrator stuff customising the basic SharePoint site structure to meet the requirements of my particular project. One of the things that my team wanted to do was to create a diagram with clickable links to views on the document library (it’s taken some time to “educate” them that folders are not a good way to go and that they need to think about searches with appropriate views and filter – think Google, not file share – but in some cases the same document was filed three times in different folders so that it appeared in a logical hierarchy!).

I was playing around with this and noticed that the URL structure for a given filtered view was petty easy to work with. So, for example:

http://servername/sites/site/Document%20Library/Forms/viewname.aspx?FilterField1=columnname&FilterValue1=value

We can even extend it further if required with &FilterField2 and &FilterValue2 (&FilterField3 and &FilterField3, etc.).

Using this we can link directly from documents and external applications/sites to a filtered view on the entire document library, giving the equivalent of a folder view (i.e. just a small group of documents) but generated dynamically and avoiding the creation additional views that need to be maintained.