Sunday, January 22, 2012

SharePoint Extended lookup field. Part 1: Using EntityEditorWithPicker.


I’m sure that many users were faced with the necessity to enter in lookup field items from two or more lists. And I’ve got an idea to make this opportunity for SharePoint users. To my surprise I found out that it can be assembled of already existing solutions.

Custom PickerDialog and SimpleQueryControl

The developing started from reading the article Customizing EntityEditorWithPicker. If we take the example given in the article as a basis it will be easy to make our own user EntityEditorWithPicker. It results in extension of three classes: EntityEditorWithPicker, PickerDialog and SimpleQueryControl. The extension of the first class is simple. However the situation with the second and the third classes is much more interesting. As it was said before the user should be given an opportunity to select items from several lists. Looking ahead, I must specify that this control will firstly provide the opportunity to select one or another list (i.e. it will be a set of controls). 

SharePoint Extended lookup field