How to get look up fields display name?

Question

I have a list with 3 columns in it.

Title, QType, Qtype_Text ..

Title is usual field. QType is a lookup field (it works). And Qtype_Text is a kind of singleline textbox. I want to get QType's display text to Qtype_Text. Coz QType cannot be used at other lists so I decided to take its text to a column at form. But here I cannot take the String Value.

If I use QType at formula, I get items' IDs. But I can't get the texts.

I tried this simple Xpath code:

@Title[@ID=QType] - > Dont Work.

And there's also something I couldn't remember, how can I get that text ?

Answer 1

Try this in an event receiver:

private void copyFromLookupToString(string fromLookup, string toField,      
SPItemEventProperties properties)
       {
           if (properties.ListItem[fromLookup] != null)
           {
               string LookupField = properties.ListItem[fromLookup].ToString();
               string[] LookupParts = LookupField.Split(new string[] { ";#" }, StringSplitOptions.None);
               string PopulateFieldWith = LookupParts[1];
               properties.ListItem[toField] = PopulateFieldWith;
           }
       }

Call it like this:

copyFromLookupToString(QType, QType_Text, properties);

Answer 2

One more option here is to have a simple workflow which copies the selected lookup field value to the text field. The workflow can be triggered whenever the item is edited. But please check if you can use the option suggested by Matthias which seems to be more simple & clean solution.

Answer 3

In the Lookup column definition of the QType column you can specify that an additional column should be added, which displayes additional fields of the referenced value:

Answer 4

I had a similar problem so for future reference this is how I resolved it.

Like you, I have cascading drop down lists that are populated using lookup data and I wanted to concatenate the displayed text from the first drop down list with the selected value in the second list for use in another field.

I added an xpath formula to the destination field that looks like the following:

concat(xdXDocument:GetDOM("GasRegion")/dfs:myFIelds/dfs:dataFields/d:SHarePointListItem_RW[d:ID = xdXDocument:get-DOM()/dfs:myFields/dfs:dataFields/my:SharePointListItem_RW/my:FaultCity]/d:Title, " - ", ../my:FaultSuburb)

Kind of a mouthful but it's mostly just a way to identify the particular value from the lookup connection. In this case GasRegion is a connection used for as the source for the first drop down list. The formula is looking for a match of the ID value in the lookup data with the value selected in the drop down list. Having found a match, it outputs the Title which is the description field for the lookup.

In the situation you've outlined you would need to replace GasRegion with your data source connection. You could try the following formula:

xdXDocument:GetDOM("Replace with your lookup datasource")/dfs:myFIelds/dfs:dataFields/d:SharePointListItem_RW[d:ID = xdXDocument:get-DOM()/dfs:myFields/dfs:dataFields/my:SharePointListItem_RW/my:QType]/d:Title