How to list categorized items in SharePoint (new at SP)

Question

I am beginner at Sharepoint and i want to make a small application on it.

I have 3 lists.

• CarFeatures
• Cars
• FeatureType

Here is my structure

FeatureType:

GearType, Speed, Color,CoolingSystem are my columns.But here i have more columns called AirCond, Radiator. CoolingSystem is Parent of these 2 columns.

In CarFeatures :

Title and FeatureType are my columns. I add items here using FeatureType.

In Car :

carName and lookuped FeaturesOfCar are my columns.

So, I want to add items to Car with features. You know, while adding a new item, a window opens and lists your options there. In this window i want 2 listboxes. one of it should hold FeturesType and when i select one of its, item it should list that FeatureType items' subitems from CarFeatures. (kind of categorize selecting ) So this way, i'll have flexible system. Coz i wanna use it another places. It must be editable and easy to use.

I hope I am clear.

Answer 1

What you're building out reminds me of a car parts catalog like AutoZone might expose where several make-model-year menus are daisy-chained together. That could possibly drive you mad. For an extremely complex UI experience, it might be helpful to build out the final product first as a 'working HTML/AJAX mockup' so to speak.

After you have your user experience nailed down, you can look into porting that over into a custom 'Application Page' (i.e. a plain old ASPX page inside of SharePoint) and then experiment from there to see how you can swap out static portions of your mockup with dynamically-sourced list data from SharePoint (assuming you want the easy-to-use backend that SharePoint provides for managing the actual source lists).

Other than that, I would tend to agree with @PurpleShadow, if the audience is in-house.

Answer 2

Is infopath an option? You can design this form with Infopath and have the listboxes with the data connection to desired list.