Roll up lists across site collections in Office 365

The Lightning Conductor Add-in for Office 365 allows you to aggregate SharePoint list items across multiple site collections. There are two rollup providers for the Office 365 add-in; Object Model Rollup Engine Provider or Search Rollup Engine Provider. The Object Model rollup provider will allow you to aggregate SharePoint list content from within a site collection without using search. Using the object model allows you to aggregate the results and see the updates to your list items in real time. The Full Trust version of the Lightning Conductor Web Part for SharePoint On-Premises can aggregate SharePoint list content across site collections and web applications without using search. However, due to the restrictions within a SharePoint Add-in, the Lightning Conductor Add-In for Office 365 SharePoint Online needs to use Search in order to aggregate SharePoint list data across site collections.

Configuring the Lightning Conductor Add-in to roll up SharePoint Lists across site collections.

Within this post, we will learn how to configure the Lightning Conductor Add-In to aggregate SharePoint list items across site collections using Search.

Note – Using Search can provide extremely powerful scenarios including aggregating SharePoint list content from on-premises and Office 365 using hybrid search.

Within the first section, we will configure the scope of the search before moving on to building the views.

Configuring the Search Scope

Assuming that you have added the Lightning Conductor Add-In to your SharePoint environment, the next step would be to Create a View of aggregated SharePoint content.

1. Click Actions, Create View
   
2. Provide a View Title on the App Part tab, and set the Configure Data Source Provider to Search Rollup Engine Provider.
   
3. On the Data Source Tab, select a result source that you wish to use. For this purpose, I will use ‘Documents’.
   
4. The Query Text can be modified to be more selective with the results.
5. Set optional parameters such as Item Limit,  Query Timeout etc.
6. Optionally set the scope of the rollup. If you leave this blank, it will include all items.
   

Note – that you can select different list content by choosing different result sources, or also by creating your own results source.

Within the next section, we will build a view of aggregated Documents.

Building the View

To build the view, firstly select the columns tab within the Lightning Conductor Add-in.

Upon clicking the Columns Tab, you will notice the columns available from the Documents Result Source. If you need to add further documents, you should map them as managed properties. Read more: https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Manage-the-search-schema-in-SharePoint-Online-d4fab46d-ba41-4c03-9d4c-32b5b33198b6

1. Check each column that you wish to display. For example; Title, Author, and Size.
2. Drag the selected columns up and down in order that you wish for them to be displayed in.
   
3. Optionally, you can specify the name of a custom Managed Property to add to the view.
4. Optionally, Add calculated columns to perform a calculation such as a concatenation between two columns.
5. Optionally, set a filter on one or more of the columns
6. Click the Display Tab to set display options.
7. Set conditional formatting by clicking the formatting icon relevant to the column that the condition and formatting will be based upon.
8. Check show item type to display the document icon.
9. Check Group by folders if you use folders in your SharePoint document libraries.
10. Set the linked column to be Title.
11. Click Save to see the results
    

Your view will now be created: