Here is a page that I have developed to do this. It's used to display a custom object I created called "Quarterly Report" which is a child object of "Account" and I use it to narrow down my selection to only one Account (I assign the StandardSetController a query that matches Id, so only one record is returned, then I do a get(0) to grab that record)

The cool thing is that after this page, I pass my users to another page that does NOT have this controller, so only the landing page for the dashboard has to implement this.

public class QuarterlyReportController {

	public Quarterly_Report__c QR {get; set;}
	
	
	public QuarterlyReportController  () {
		QR = new Quarterly_Report__c();	
	}
	
	public ApexPages.StandardSetController setCont {get {
		
		if(QR.Parent_Account__c != null) {
			setCont = new ApexPages.StandardSetController(Database.getQueryLocator([SELECT Id, (SELECT Name, Id FROM Quarterly_Reports__r) FROM Account WHERE Id = :QR.Parent_Account__c]));
		}
		return setCont;
	
	} set; }
	
	public List<Quarterly_Report__c> reports { get {
		List<Quarterly_Report__c> reps = new List<Quarterly_Report__c>();
		if(setCont != null) {
			List<Account> accs = (List<Account>)setCont.getRecords();
			reps = accs.get(0).Quarterly_Reports__r;
			return reps;
		}
		else return null;
	} set;}

	public PageReference refresh() {
		return ApexPages.currentPage();
	}
}