With over 1,000 Internet sites running on SharePoint listed on my site, I have been looking at ways to better present the list of sites. One scenario is to show similar sites based on the country and industry classification of the current site being viewed.
E.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/Web%20Site/websitedetails.aspx?ID=2850
This is the page people go to as a result of finding a site in the search results or from the home page summary of new content.
To enable this capability, I used SharePoint Designer (SPD) to create a new list view page and added 2 data views (DVWP's) for the list that contains web site details. If you are new to SPD and the DVWP the check out Laura Rogers article on EndUserSharePoint.com
The first DVWP is a single item view which is filtered on the URL Parameter value ID.
The 2nd DVWP has several parameters defined so that it can receive web part connection values from the first web part and use them in the data source query. This is much more efficient that just filtering the results.
I then create a Web Part Connection from the single item DVWP to the Similar Items web part.
Note: set the Target Action: = "Get Parameters From" rather than "Get Filter Values From"
After the connection is created, add one filter criteria at a time to the 2nd DVWP and confirm that it works.
You can specify default values in the parameters so that SPD still shows results in the 2nd DVWP after the filter is applied.