How to create the following list structure in sharepoint

Question

I am trying to create a list with following structure in sharepoint 2010.

Is it possible to create like this? You may say that enter values by leaving title as blank. But here Title Filed should be required field. If any one help me to do in programatically(C# code) I would feel great. As per the suggestion of PirateEric final out come like this.

But no possibility as per my requirement!!

Answer 1

3 columns, Title, Products, and Price.

Create a list View, with the columns Product and Price and group it by Title with it expanded by default. That will get you close enough to that.

Answer 2

I'd create a second list called something like "Product Groups", containing items for each value like Vegetable and Fruits in the Title column (which you can rename if you want to). Then in the Products list, I'd have three columns:

• Title - Containing your values [Potato, Tomato, ...] - You can rename this Title column to Product if you want.
• Product Group - A Lookup column to the Product Groups list
• Price - The Price, as above

For your views, you could group by Product Group, etc.

And yes, a tomato is a fruit.

Answer 3

You can achieve the same with creating one more column call CustomTitle. And refer this filed into your view instead of default Title.

Or you can make this title filed optional from the FieldsExplorer tool.

Answer 4

I would definitely go for Marc's approach as well, by using a lookup field for the product category.

Looking at it from a relational point of view, a product category is an entity in itself, so that should be stored in a separate table. The problem with using just the title or only a plain choice field is that it violates at least the first normal form.

You are likely going to run into problems when you don't use a lookup field. Imagine when you want to change the name of a category. In any other approach that would result in having to update multiple entries, because changes are not reflected in other records. Changes made on a looked up value however, immediately show in your products list too.

Plus, using the title field for category has the drawback of constantly having to type your category name when adding a new product, which could easily result in unexpected behaviour when making a typo.

For future expansion, say you want to store additional information about your categories, then at least the lookup-based solution already allows you to do this without any significant changes.

Also, when querying your data, I'd say lookup fields work better too, as you can at least query on an ID instead of a plain string value, one which in this case happens to be the name of the category too. Your mileage may vary here, but the ID-based solution seems a little more robust to me.

Possible minor overhead is easily outweighed by the advantages you're getting by using a lookup field.