Lookup field with multiple locations for SharePoint 2010 - sharepoint

Folks!
In my recent project I’ve faced with the situation when I need to develop “tricky” Custom Field Type (CFT) for Share Point 2010. That CFT must behave like an Out-Of-The-Box Lookup Field, but it must point to couple of different locations. For example, the Lookup field can be pointed to the web A, list B in the web A and to the some field in the list B – let’s call that like a Location, but my field must be able to point to many Locations at the same time. In addition to that main requirement, my CFT must be sortable, filterable and represent an ability to search by EQUAL using CAML, like a Lookup field. Does anybody faced with such tasks? SharePoint masters, please, instruct me with the RIGHT path!!!

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Leave Management System in SharePoint 2013

I am developing Leave Management System in SharePoint 2013. Employees can apply for leaves and Manager can either approve or reject it.
I have accomplished this by creating a new list - "Leaves" and starting a workflow when a new item gets added. Workflow sends an email to Manager and creates a task item for him to be able to approve or reject it.
However, I would like to know if this approach is preferable in real time scenario. Suppose for organization of 500 employees, can a single list hold so many records for all employees. What are possible ways here to utilize the features in SharePoint and also create a scalable application.
Also, I am also planning to develop a new Add-in in SharePoint 2013 since for applying new leave, we need to display additional information such as available leaves and do some custom validations which are not provided by default SharePoint list. I will be adding the new item to the SharePoint list from the custom developed page so that the workflow still is intact and I am still utilizing out-of-box SharePoint features. Is this the way to go for enterprise level application or there are any other alternatives. Please suggest.
SharePoint Lists are capable of holding that much data. I don't see a problem if you use a single list to hold leave request of 500 employees.
Assume a worst case scenario that all of the 500 employee apply 25 leaves individually in a year, then the item count would be (500*25= 12500) which is not bad.
You will need to take care of the List Threshold error, because data is greater than 5000. For this you can create views which always bring out results less than 5000.
Now lets say you have plan for 5 years, so each year you will add 12500 items which at the end of 5 years will be 12500*5 = 62500 items
Here you can think of 2 options
You can create a list for each year, i.e. Leaves2016, Leaves2017 etc.
In a single list create folders of year, and inside them add all leave datas.
Note: The only major thing you need to take care of List view threshold problem. Which can be tackled with intelligently designing
views
For your second question.
I agree that the OOB SharePoint List form will not cater your requirements. So creating a custom page an add in or something else is a way to go. As far as your data is getting inserted into a list and eventually activating a workflow there is no harm in it.

Sharepoint multiple list update

I'm creating three approved software lists for my company with SharePoint. One is the general list for all associates the next is the restricted list which will contain software like wireshark that only certain people should have access to and the last is the master list which will be a combination of the other two lists.
What would be ideal is being able to add the software to the master list and have it update the other two lists automagically. The unique key will of course be the software title. The field that will determine which list the row will be added to is the the [group] field. (This is where the uncertainty comes in) There will be 4 values that can go into this [group] field they are: restricted, general, engineering, media.
I would like to have the rows with "restricted" go to the restricted list, obviously, and everything else go to the general list.
I'm very new to SharePoint (~1 week) and I'm trying to simplify this process as much as possible. I'm continuing to read and watch the videos to lean more however, I understand this is a complex application. I thought I'd pose this question to people with more experience than myself to find if it's even possible. If not I'll be able to change my train of thought sooner.
Thank you for your time
This is probably a question for https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/
But -- what I would do in your situation is only use 1 list and make multiple views.
Each view can be filtered by a different criteria (like your group column in this case) then instead of having 3 distinct lists, you can display or have a link for each view (they all get their own URI in SharePoint) seperately.
This way you only ever have to update 1 list, and you avoid the overhead/complexity of trying to copy into other lists with event recievers or workflows or something else.
If someone reading this needs instructions on views:
You can create/switch views from the 'List' or 'Library' tab when you're viewing the list. Then when you add the list to a web part page, you can select which view to use in the web part properties window.

Getting data fields AND associated entities into a Word file

NB. This question might be a bit similar to another one but still result in a different answer, hence the division in two.
I'd like to print out the contents of an entity, consisting of a subset of the fields and including some rudimentary information on its associated entities.
E.g. I'd like to print a lead by displaying its name and phone number but also a list of associated instances of type new_somesome (their new_name and new_size, for example) connected to it.
How can I do that?
I've tried cheating by using mail template but that doesn't include the related entities. I'm not sure how to edit the default print view to include the associatees neither.
Is it acceptable for you to use reports?
For this purpose you can try free MS ReportBuilder. MS allows to build reports without using such large tool as MS Buisness Intelligence. These custom reports appears to be more flexible than system ones. Another way is to try Mail merge functionality.

Filter candidates when selecting using lookup

I've resolved this problem in a complicated way and now I'd be delighted to see if there's a simpler solution.
Suppose that we have two custom entities, Alpha and Beta, each of which has a custom field called reference. If I place two lookups on a form, one for each of the custom entities, all's dandy as long as I don't require the lookup processes to depend on each other.
Now, what if I pick Alpha instance (call it a) first and then only want to see those Beta instances in the search box that share their owner with the selected a? That's easy, right? You just customize the filtration of the field.
But what if I want the selection of Beta instance to be predicated on the custom reference field?
Do I really have to declare a dynamical view to cheat myself around this part? It's so inconvenient and cumbersome...
You've done it the only way I was aware it could be done.
We can only hope it might be different in CRM 2013 i guess.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Import Data Duplication Rules

I have a requirement in which I need to import data from excel (CSV) to Dynamics CRM regularly.
Instead of using some simple Data Duplication Rules, I need to implement a point system to determine whether a data is considered duplicate or not.
Let me give an example. For example these are the particular rules for Import:
First Name, exact match, 10 pts
Last Name, exact match, 15 pts
Email, exact match, 20 pts
Mobile Phone, exact match, 5 pts
And then the Threshold value => 19 pts
Now, if a record have First Name and Last Name matched with an old record in the entity, the points will be 25 pts, which is higher than the threshold (19 pts), therefore the data is considered as Duplicate
If, for example, the particular record only have same First Name and Mobile Phone, the points will be 15 pts, which is lower than the threshold and thus considered as Non-Duplicate
What is the best approach to achieve this requirement? Is it possible to utilize the default functionality of Import Data in the MS CRM? Is there any 3rd party Add-on that answer my requirement above?
Thank you for all the help.
Updated
Hi Konrad, thank you for your suggestions, let me elaborate here:
Excel. You could filter out the data using Excel and then, once you've obtained a unique list, import it.
Nice one but I don't think it is really workable in my case, the data will be coming regularly from client in moderate numbers (hundreds to thousands). Typically client won't check about the duplication on the data.
Workflow. Run a process removing any instance calculated as a duplicate.
Workflow is a good idea, however since it is being processed asynchronously, my concern is the user in some cases may already do some update/changes to the data inserted, before the workflow finish working.. therefore creating some data inconsistency or at the very least confusing user experience
Plugin. On every creation of a new record, you'd check if it's to be regarded as duplicate-ish and cancel it's creation (or mark for removal).
I like this approach. So I just import like usual (for example, to contact entity), but I already have a plugin in place that getting triggered every time a record is created, the plugin will check whether the record is duplicat-ish or not and took necessary action.
I haven't been fiddling a lot with duplicate detection but looking at your criteria you might be able to make rules that match those, pretty much three rules to cover your cases, full name match, last name and mobile phone match and email match.
If you want to do the points system I haven't seen any out of the box components that solve this, however CRM Extensions have a product called Import Manager that might have that kind of duplicate detection. They claim to have customized duplicate checking. Might be worth asking them about this.
Otherwise it's custom coding that will solve this problem.
I can think of the following approaches to the task (depending on the number of records, repetitiveness of the import, automatization requirement etc.) they may be all good somehow. Would you care to elaborate on the current conditions?
Excel. You could filter out the data using Excel and then, once you've obtained a unique list, import it.
Plugin. On every creation of a new record, you'd check if it's to be regarded as duplicate-ish and cancel it's creation (or mark for removal).
Workflow. Run a process removing any instance calculated as a duplicate.
You also need to consider the implication of such elimination of data. There's a mathematical issue. Suppose that the uniqueness' radius (i.e. the threshold in this 1D case) is 3. Consider the following set of numbers (it's listed twice, just in different order).
1 3 5 7 -> 1 _ 5 _
3 1 5 7 -> _ 3 _ 7
Are you sure that's the intended result? Under some circumstances, you can even end up with sets of records of different sizes (only depending on the order). I'm a bit curious on why and how the setup came up.
Personally, I'd go with plugin, if the above is OK by you. If you need to make sure that some of the unique-ish elements never get omitted, you'd probably best of applying a test algorithm to a backup of the data. However, that may defeat it's purpose.
In fact, it sounds so interesting that I might create the solution for you (just to show it can be done) and blog about it. What's the dead-line?

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