It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, but things are finally calming down at work (and now it’s the Holidays!). Anyways, this tutorial came about because someone had asked me “Is this possible?” and it is. This is out of the box. We don’t have any eCal or anything enabled at work, and dashboards are becoming a big deal, so I was able to pull together an easy dashboard. If you want to customize it, you’ll need to get a little more into what’s going on, but it should work if you follow my steps below.
So what do we do?
- Download this zip file here. We’ll need to edit just a couple of things in the files, so unzip it somewhere. Inside the TrafficLight.xsl, you need paste in your List’s URL into the file. If you look for it, there is a URL near the bottom. Put the link between the quotes and be sure that “/DispForm.aspx?ID={@ID}” is in there. Otherwise, you won’t be able to click the title for the Item’s link.
- Upload it (and the images) to a library somewhere on your site.
- Create a Project Task List (or a Task List) and create a Calculated Column called “TrafficLight”. Open the TrafficLightColumn.txt and replace the URLs with the proper photos. Example: Paste in the URL for the Green image into GREENLIGHT-URL. Once your statement is done, paste that into the calculated column’s equation field. This is where you can change your status (or if you have more, add additional). The images I’ve given are really simple and I created for this example. Whichever kind of list you use, just be sure your Status field (inside the calculated column) name matches the actual column. Otherwise you’ll get an error and need to fix it. For example, my original example used a Project Task list, but I implemented this on a Task list in my Office365 and I had to change “Task Status” to just “Status”. So keep that in mind.
- To implement, you will need to Edit the page and add the Task List to the page you want the Dashboard on. Edit the Webpart and select the “Active Tasks’ view. Then navigate down to the ‘Miscellaneous’ section and paste in your XSL’s URL into XSL Link. Click OK.
That’s it. Please let me know if you have any issues with this, either in the comments or twitter. I’ve tried to make it as general as possible.
The tool I used to create and edit the XSL is the Magic Data View Template. You can find out more info on it at: http://blog.sharepointexperience.com/2012/03/06/introducing-the-magic-data-view-builder/.