The Content Query Web Part is very useful for content aggregation and roll-up across the site collection scope. It was around in the previous version of SharePoint but has been improved in 2010 as can be seen in this MSDN Blog. There are, however, some inconveniences associated with it. CQWP may have issues with anonymous access as described here. The other issue which was discussed in this thread and also mentioned (2007) in this post is related to caching.
So, you configure a CQWP and apply some filtering. You test the results and they look OK. Then, you discover that new additions or updates are not reflected instantly – not even with a forced refresh, unless you try several times. You may go back to edit the web part and find that results are reflected immediately after an edit, but that’s not a solution.
The problem is related to caching which cannot be adjusted from the user interface. There are two workarounds: either export the web part and add a property to the exported file and re-import it (as explained in the thread above) or edit the page hosting the CQWP in SharePoint Designer to add a property to the tag directly: edit the page and while the CQWP is selected, switch to code view and add
UseCache=”False”
to the
There are a few posts dealing with CQWP customization but most of them use the publishing pages. A few requests have been posted to customize blog posts using CQWP and there is something specific to this request: the CQWP does not output the blog post body out of the box. Before I describe the process, I should give credit to the blog post by Heather Solomon (2007, but still valid for 2010).
There are two main steps in this process: customize the ItemStyle and the CQWP. You can find the reference on adding properties to the CQWP at this MSDN article.
So, we export the CQWP and edit the line that has CommonViewFields to become Body, Note
Here, Body is the post body text and Note is its type (yes, it’s not RichHtml as you may think), but how do we know? You check the schema file at \14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\DiscussionsList\Discuss
Now that we have the field available in the CQWP, we edit the item style. The ItemStyle.xsl file lives in the Style Library in your site collection (only there, one style library per site collection) inside the folder XSL Style Sheets (that’s easy to figure out). You download the file and open it in a text or xml editor. Here, we will copy the default style and paste it under the original (starts with and ends with – around 67 lines). Of course, we need to name our style – I replaced the first line by You will notice we have a few blocks of xsl variables and I added my new one under the last one (Display Title)
We will get back to the removeMarkup soon (I used the same one by Heather).
The code starting with is where we show the data, so I added
… (More)
just before the last
in that block (close to the end of the template). Here, I am taking the first 75 characters of the clean text and added a link to see the full post.
Finally, I added the template that strips out html tags right after the closing tag of my custom template (). The removeMarkup template is available from
Heather’s post toward the end and is clearly marked.
Save the xsl file and re-upload to the styles library (xsl style sheets folder). You need to publish a major version for this to work (not only check it in).
Now, you add a web part to your page based on the exported and adjusted one (under the web part groups, locate the Upload web part then select from imported web parts). Configure your CQWP and select your new item style (do not add Body; in the Description field!). If you did not have typos, you should see something similar to the above screen shot. If your itemstyle is not correct, your CQWP will not show and will give error (add ?contents=1 to the url and delete it, then roll back to the previous version of the itemstyle until you fix the custom one). See more on Heather’s blog on how to see available fields and find types etc.
