Set people picker value programmatically

Question

I have SharePoint newform.aspx, I want to make the default value for a people picker to be the current user and disable the people picker. so I want to make look like a textbox but at the same time to make it submitted as person inside my list so Lync status appears on the right side of the column, is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

You can get the current user using SPServices like described in the following documentation:

http://spservices.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=%24%28%29.SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser

You should specifiy the name property, so you do something like this:

var user = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({
    fieldName: "Name",
    debug: false
});

After getting the user, you can use all jQuery stuff to reach what you want, so you could write a code like this:

$("div[title='People Picker']").text(user); //Set the text for the control
$("div[Title='People Picker']").attr("contentEditable", false); //will make it disabled.
$("a[Title='Check Names']").hide(); //Will hide the check button
$("a[Title='Browse']").hide(); //Will hide the browse control that looks like a book

Note that you should specifiy more specific selectors in case you have more than one people picker and you want to modify one.

Answer 2

If suitable in your case, reference some javascript on the newForm (for example by making a custom newform.aspx).

You could get the current logged in user by combining information from _spPageContextInfo with a REST query. E.g.

var userid = _spPageContextInfo.userId;
var requestUri = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl + "/_api/web/getuserbyid(" + userid + ")";
$.ajax({
  url : requestUri,
  contentType : "application/json;odata=verbose",
  headers : requestHeaders,
  success : onSuccess,
  error : onError});

Using the property LoginName returned by the REST query the people picker can be set using the following code (assuming jQuery is available):

var loginName = "i:0#.w|contoso\\johannes"; // Assume this is the returned value from the rest query
var form = jQuery("table[class='ms-formtable']"); // get the form element
var userField = form.find("input[id$='ClientPeoplePicker_EditorInput']").get(0) // find the people picker element, assuming you dont have multiple people pickers on the form 
var peoplepicker = SPClientPeoplePicker.PickerObjectFromSubElement(userField) // Use SPClientPeoplePicker to get the actual picker object
peoplepicker.AddUserKeys(loginName); // finally set the loginName as the people picker value, this also triggers a validation.

Unfortunately I don´t have a code example for making the people picker disabled.