Is there a way to inherit list items down to a sub-site from a sub-collection in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1?
We'd like to have a list of contacts available at a site collection level and have those inherit down to a list at a site level. The sub-site level would then be able to have contacts specific to itself along with any contacts created in the parent site. Is that possible?
The simplest idea I can think of is to use a dataview webpart to show the list items in the parent site and another for the child site.
Having the inheritance relationship between list as you imagine, would be really quite cool, but it is definitely not out of the box functionality.
Lately I've been handling requirements like this using jQuery. Two web service calls to get data from the current and parent sites, then merge and display the data client side. It won't be a standard SharePoint list view, but you can get pretty close if that's what you're looking for.
I have an example of something similar on my blog:
http://www.tqcblog.com/archive/2009/05/04/sharepoint-discussion-with-jquery.aspx