New/Edit form how to tell if people picker is multiple or single with code

Question

I'm doing some manipulation of my new and edit forms using javascript and jQuery. I'm able to find all the people pickers on the page with the following selector

var $pickers = $('div[title="People Picker"]');

but I haven't been able to figure out how to tell if each picker is a single person or multiperson. These are the old-style people pickers not the client-side pickers. I'm looking through the html and not seeing anything that would directly indicate which kind of people column the picker is for.

The multipicks do have a line that says Enter users separated with semicolons. so I could check for that, but that seems pretty sketchy.

I know that the new client people pickers have a dictionary object on the page and that can be used to determine if a client-side people picker is single or multiple by

SPClientPeoplePicker.SPClientPeoplePickerDict["<name>_TopSpan"].AllowMultipleUsers

Is anything similar for the old style people pickers. I've also looked through the entityeditor.js file, but can't find anything to help. Any tips on how to do this properly?

Answer 1

It doesn't appear that there will be anything in the rendered DOM from what I can gather. What you could do is fire off a GetList request via SPServices and parse through the field elements. It clearly states in the person group fields in a couple places if it accepts multiple values, Type and Mult. Some XML from a GetList call, the first is a single selection and the second is a multiple selection:

<Field 
    Type="User" 
    DisplayName="single" 
    List="UserInfo" 
    Required="FALSE" 
    EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE" 
    ShowField="ImnName" 
    UserSelectionMode="PeopleOnly" 
    UserSelectionScope="0" 
    ID="{bde6ed18-5177-419d-8b11-19f4e1a46f51}" 
    SourceID="{cac5800a-4b47-4f62-a4d9-25b48d3bb2e1}" 
    StaticName="single" 
    Name="single" 
    ColName="int1" 
    RowOrdinal="0"/>

<Field 
    Type="UserMulti" 
    DisplayName="multiple"
    List="UserInfo" 
    Required="FALSE" 
    EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE" 
    ShowField="ImnName" 
    UserSelectionMode="PeopleOnly" 
    UserSelectionScope="0" 
    Mult="TRUE" 
    Sortable="FALSE" 
    ID="{5ccce6e6-0e2d-4c3e-9460-124a1ac828a5}" 
    SourceID="{cac5800a-4b47-4f62-a4d9-25b48d3bb2e1}" 
    StaticName="multiple" 
    Name="multiple" 
    ColName="int2" 
    RowOrdinal="0"/>

SPServices does offer a nice function to work with people picker fields that might sway your decision to incorporate the library, http://spservices.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=%24%28%29.SPServices.SPFindPeoplePicker. People picker fields are just ugly to work with in general.