What can you connect the Lightning Conductor to?
There are currently three places from which the Lightning Conductor can consume a value:
- The current page environment
- Lightning Filter web parts
- Other Lightning Conductor web parts on the page
From the page environment, the Lightning Conductor can consume values from four contextual properties:
- Site properties
- Current user information
- Query string
- Search
What parts of the Lightning Conductor can be connected?
The Lightning Conductor’s dynamic connections can currently be used in three ways:
- Filter content
- Format content
- Select a view
- Pass a parameter to a Microsoft Graph query
Use a connection to filter content
You can access dynamic filter connections either within the filter option for each column on the columns tab of the configuration wizard, in the Advanced Filter dialog, or even in the filter available from a displayed column header. Clicking on the filter icon for a column in the configuration wizard gives you this dialog:
You’ve always been able to create a filter this way, but now you can click on the little “plug” icon to create a dynamic connection.
Here, we can choose from any of the available dynamic sources. In this example, there’s another Lightning Conductor on the page, so that’s why “Lightning Conductor” appears in the dropdown. If there had been a Lightning Filters web part on the page, that would have also appeared here. In this example, we’re going to filter the Project column by a parameter in the URL. This could be useful if you want to create a single page for project details for any project, and the link to the page would contain the project name in the URL. So we’ll select Page Environment, and then the Query String property.
Then select Query Parameters.
And then because we’ve already created a blank URL parameter called project, that appears in the dropdown for us to select. See around 2:00 of the Lightning Conductor tutorial video linked below for more on creating a query string parameter.
Click Save, and then you’ll see that the normal text box in the filter dialog is now greyed out, since the filter value is coming from the dynamic connection.
Now when a URL is specified with ?project=ProjectA (for example), the items displayed in the Lightning Conductor will only be those where the Project field value is ProjectA.
Use a connection to format content
We’ve also added the same dynamic connection capability to the Lightning Conductor’s conditional formatting feature.
This means that you can do something like highlight a row or add an icon when the item or document is Created By the current user…
Note that you’ll want to use Like rather than = here, due to the way SharePoint stores the user information.
Use a connection to select a view
The third dynamic connection is available in the Lightning Conductor’s web part configuration pane on the right side of the page when in edit mode. The options are the same as above; you can see an example of this in the Lightning Conductor video linked below.
