InfoPath form Contact selector

 The Contact Selector consists of 3 data nodes:

  • DisplayName
  • AccountId
  • AccountType


Each is just a text field.  When you publish your form, you have the option of promoting one or all of the fields. DisplayName only contains the PreferredName attribute of the User Profile Database, which is typically in the form of LastName, FirstName, but it depends on your AD setup.

AccountId is the most valuable field, because it contains the user's domain name in the form of domain\username (i.e. microsoft\userId).  If you promote this field to SharePoint, then this value is immediately usable for sending workflow emails in SharePoint Designer.  I do this all the time.  Also, that value can have the domain portion stripped out and be used to query the GetUserProfileByName web method to retrieve the selected user's profile info, including Email Address, Manager, Department, and many other attributes stored in the profile database.

Since these are text fields, they do not match the data type of a SharePoint People Picker, so you cannot bind any of them directly.  What you have to do is retrieve the selected user's email address from the previously-mentioned web method, store it in a hidden field, promote that field, then use a SharePoint Designer workflow to "Set Field in Current Item" and set the People Picker field to the value of the user's email address, because that's what those field types accept as input.

To retrieve the email address of the user in the Contact Selector, use my method:

InfoPath - Get user information without writing code (extended)

The key for you will be that when you do the part right before Figure 15, you need to set the AccountName query parameter to the username value from AccountId.  You do this by setting that field to this function substring-after(AccountId, "\").  This will strip the username off of the domain name so that the username is sent to the web service.  For instance, microsoft\ccobb would be stripped down to ccobb and then used to query the WS.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding Contact Selector Control to InfoPath form

The Contact Selector control is an ActiveX control but it is a special cased control, in that it can also be used in InfoPath browser forms. To use this control there are specific steps that need to be taken – let’s take a look at those now. Step 1 : Steps to add Contact Selector control to your Controls Task Pane 1) From the Controls Task Pane click "Add or Remove Custom Controls" link 2) Click the Add button 3) Add Custom Control Wizard select "ActiveX control" and click Next 4) This will display a list of controls , select "Contact Selector" ,click Next 5) Select “Don’t include a .cab file” and click Next 6) For Binding Property select Value and click Next 7) From the Field or group type box choose Field or group (any data type) and click Finish 8) Click Close and then click OK Step 2: Create the data structure for the Contact Selector Control The Contact Selector control needs to have a specific data structure to work properly – this is documented on
Read more

Adding Validation to a Custom NewForm.aspx in SharePoint & Redirect

SharePoint has a built in function called "PreSaveAction" that can be invoked to process anything before the form should submit. So now we will create a submit button which calls “PresaveActon” function. Once users Submits the form, PreSaveAction is executed. If PreSaveAction is returns true it will commit and redirect. If the PreSaveAction returns false, then the commit will not happen nor the redirect. Input Button Code: Replace this code <SharePoint:SaveButton runat="server" ControlMode="New" id="savebutton1"/> with <input type="button" value="Submit" name="btnSave" onclick="javascript: if(PreSaveAction()) {ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent('__commit;__redirect={http://<Site>/ SitePages/ThankYou.aspx}')}" /> Add Script in NewCustom Form. Now edit New custom newform.aspx and add content editor webpart and with below script <script type="text/javascript
Read more

How to add to Sub-Sub Menu in SharePoint

Image
MOSS 2007 sites can display drop down menus in the tabbed navigation across the top. Unfortunately there is not an easy check box to act ivate this functionality; instead things just have to be set up the right way. If you want your MOSS site to show drop down menus, make sure the following is true or walk through the following steps: 1. From the root of the parent site (Home) choose to create a new site (Site 1). Once that site is created, you will be in that new site. From here choose to create a new page. 2. Once that is created,choose to create another new site (SubSite 1). Then create a new page in SubSite1 3. Your site structure should resemble like this (Pic Shown below) 4. For each site in the Navigation settings, both Show Subsites and Show Pages should be checked. a. Select Site Actions - Site Settings - Modify Navigation. b. Check Show subsites and Show pages in the first row. 5. The end resul
Read more