Sharepoint limit lookup dropdown entries by "pre-filter"

Question

Following scenario: List A contains several thousand items, List B has a lookup-column to List A. When a user is creating item in List B he has to select the List A item via the mentioned lookup-column from a dropdown. As you can imagine its hard to find in a drowdown with several thousands items the correct value to choose. Now my question Is it possible to add a search field to have something like a pre-filter. Like: tipe 3 letters and the dropdown shows only possible values which contains these three letters? Thanks for your help. Dirk

Answer 1

This mechanism can be achieved very easily if instead of the list A you had the same terms inside the term store.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks like https://www.dynamics101.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/031813_2039_ManagedMeta12.png

If LIST A has other columns that you do not want to lose the solution something related to jquery like described in this page https://weblogs.asp.net/jan/sharepoint-search-as-you-type-with-jquery

Answer 2

There's nothing native in SharePoint to accomplish this. You'll need to write some javascript.

1. Create an "on change" event hook for your filter field (dropdown, text, etc.)
2. When the page loads, store the entire array of target choices (to be filtered) in a temp variable that you can access later.
3. When the filter value changes, the change callback should filter the temp array according to your criteria and replace the dropdown choices with your new filtered array.
4. If the filter is "cleared" it could either reset it back to show everything, or only show a placeholder like "Please select a filter...", depending how you want your UX to behave.

Hope this helps!