Sharepoint webpart combobox of lists

Question

I have a webpart that works off of a list but what I\'m trying to do create a dropdown that contains a list of sharepoint lists so that when the user edits the page and selects

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to create a custom editor part. In the part you would have one dropdown that shows the names of the lists (you probably want to filter hidden and empty lists) and, when an item is selected from the list, a second dropdown shows the Title column of the items from the selected list.

Here's some code (edited here, so it will need to be cleaned up) to help you get started:

protected Page_Load(...)
{
    if (IsPostBack) return;

    var web = SPContext.Current.Web;
    var query = from list in web.Lists
                where list.Hidden == false && list.ItemCount == 0
                select list;

    DropDownList1.DataSource = query;
    DropDownList1.DataTextField = "Title";
    DropDownList1.DataBind();
}

protected DropDownList1_SelectedIndexChanged(...)
{
    var web = SPContext.Current.Web;
    var listName = DropDownList1.Text;
    var list = web.Lists[listName];
    var table = list.Items.GetDataTable();
    DropDownList2.DataSource = table;
    DropDownList2.DataTextField = "Title";
    DropDownList2.DataValueField = "ID";
    DropDownList2.DataBind();
}

Answer 2

What you are looking for is called a Toolpart. Take a look at this example for a tutorial on how to create one.

Overall, your general steps will be:

1. Create your custom Toolpart class inheriting from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ToolPart
2. In your custom Toolpart, override CreateChildControls, write the code to iterate over the lists in your SPWeb, and add those to a DropDownList
3. In your webpart, override GetToolParts and add your custom ToolPart so that it shows up in the right hand side