SharePoint-View: "This column type cannot be filtered"

Question

Hallo,

i've got a list in a SharePoint-Website (WSS 3.0 SP1) that has a few lookup columns -
and i can filter the view of that list by some of that lookup columns, but not by all of them.
When i click the column-header in the view i can filter the view by the lookup-values - but some columns display the entry "This column type cannot be filtered" (grayed out) where the filter-options should be.

I do not see why this happens; this does happen if the lookup-field is a required field or not, and even if the 'Title' is the column to look up.

Any idea why this happens? What can i do to prevent this behavior?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Difficult to say what is causing it in your situation.

Here is a walk through on how to connect a filter web part to a data web part:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102509971033.aspx

Do the columns that cannot be filtered have something in common?

Answer 2

kpinhack,

Without knowing how your fields/columns were created and deployed (and at the risk of oversimplifying), it could be as simple as the fields themselves not being marked as "Filterable":

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spfield.filterable.aspx

Each SPField type has a Filterable boolean property that can (obviously) be set to TRUE or FALSE. If the property is "FALSE," then the field can't be used for filtering operations.

Whether the Filterable property is set to TRUE or FALSE on an SPField is going to be a function of how the developer defined it. If the fields were created by custom code/CAML, then that code or CAML could be modified to set the property value to TRUE.

For what it's worth!

Answer 3

This is (usually) also the case when the column is a compound column, like the Name field in a publishing Pages library.