Sharepoint: How do I filter a document library view to show the contents of a subfolder?

Question

A number of business areas I work with use a folder structure to organise their Sharepoint housed documents (not ideal I know, but we're stuck with it).

I would like to use a web part page to present a number of views of their document libraries based on the subfolders that the documents appear in, but this is proving more difficult than I had thought. Has anyone overcome this problem in the past?

Solution 1

With Sharepoint Designer you can edit the CAML of your XSLT List View.

If you set the Scope attribute of the View element to Recursive or RecursiveAll, which returns all Files and Folders, you can filter the documents by FileDirRef:

<Where>
   <Contains>
      <FieldRef Name='FileDirRef' />
      <Value Type='Lookup'>MyFolder</Value>
   </Contains>
</Where>

This returns all documents which contain the string 'MyFolder' in their path.

I found infos about this on http://platinumdogs.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/querying-document-libraries-or-pulling-teeth-with-caml/ and useful information abouts fields at http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/03/21/wss-field-display-amp-internal-names-for-lists-amp-document-libraries.aspx

Solution 2

Have you thought about creating a view with 'Folder = Show all items without folders', that would get all your documents out of their folders and then perhaps you could create your filter(s) over that view.

Solution 3

Have a look at the content by type web part - http://codeplex.com/eoffice - probably the most flexible viewing web part.