Validate text column against [Me]'s Display Name

Question

I have two lists in SharePoint 2013

1. Trips
2. Drivers

Drivers has a column called Active Driver that is a single line of text formatted "Lastname, Firstname". Drivers also has a separate column that is a Person column which I am not using for the lookup (since I only want to show active drivers based on other logic - irrelevant here).

Trips has a lookup column that looks up the "Active Driver" column.

Trips has a View which I want to filter by Active Driver is equal to [Me]. But it's not working. It's as though I need something like Text([Me]) but that is not working either.

Answer 1

It will not work because the Lookup in your Trips List to the Person value in the Drivers list is a reference and not the actual value.
And [Me] is old (pre SharePoint 2007) legacy code that (when the View is compiled for the current user) does a a server-side comparison on current user Name and the value in the field you compare with.
It does not perform the Lookup like the rest of the SharePoint View display code does.
(I think it is the same reason why you can not use Lookup Columns or other non Text/Number columns in Calculated Column Formulas)

Ways around it

• Copy the actual value to (an extra) column in your Trips list with a workflow
• If you only need it for View Display purposes:
  • use CSR (Client Side Rendering) SP2013/Online only to filter on Current User
  • add JavaScript code to every ListItem which hides the item if it doesn't match with the current user