SP 2010 Connected Lookup Fields at 14.6.10

SharePoint 2010 introduces some new features regarding lookup fields.
But there are still some things to improve... for instance, SharePoint 2010 still doesn't have filtered lookups and you can only lookup thing in the same sitecollection. In this post I will look at some new features and some things that should be improved (in my opinion).

The new stuff

Concatenate fields

In SharePoint 2010, you can concatenate fields from the remote list when creating a lookup. This means that you can now - for example - create a lookup to a list of contacts which displays the first name, last name, position and email instead of full name or first name or last name.

Data integrity

Another cool thing is data integrity: you can prevent an item from being deleted that has other items connected to it or cascade the delete, ie deleting all dependent items.
Let's say you have a project list and project tasks list, where a task is connected to a project.
So, by deleting a project you can make sure that all that project tasks are also deleted.
Or - if you'd like, to prevent deleting a project with active tasks! which can be very helpful.

Reversed Look up

There's also news on reversed lookup. SharePoint 2010 does not fully support reverse lookup fields, however it does have a new API for getting all related items for a specific list items.
This is how it works: the new API will get all items in SharePoint that have a lookup that is connected to the current item. The API comes with a new web part which you can drop at any listitem viewform to see its connected items.

Things to improve

Reversed Look up

Like I said in the beginning, there are still some things to improve, for instance, if you want real reverse lookup functionality you will have to DIY or buy a third party solution.

Connected Look up

Another thing that is still missing is cascaded lookup: the ability to filter a field based on the content of another field, again one could try something from codeplex or buy a third party solution, but the disadvantage of all these solutions is that none of them support editing in datasheet view, so if you want to bulk edit, for example some meta data in a document library, the fields become read only. This is because the controls are webcontrols and the datasheet view uses an active x from ms-office.

The future

Currently I started with the development of a connected lookup control (SP 2007 and SP 2010) that is fully functioning, also in a datasheet view. I hope to release a first version in two or three months.