In 11.0 SP11, type-ahead was introduced to List and Item fields to make editing forms easier and more convenient for Users. When a user types in one of these fields, a dynamic list of options will be shown based on what the user has typed in to the field. You can see this functionality in action below as we assign a Designated User to one of our Parts.

In this post, we'll cover how we can manipulate this type-ahead functionality to make work even easier for our users.

Dynamically Populate Dropdown

One common question we hear on the forums is how to dynamically populate a dropdown field.

The example below explores the use case of wanting to limit the selection of Authoring Tools on the Document Form. In this use case, we only want users to be able to pick Microsoft Office tools when creating and editing Documents. To accomplish this, we will first query for a subset of the Values on the Authoring Tools List. Once we have these values, we will construct an array of javascript objects that will represent each option we want to be available in the dropdown.

gist.github.com/…/5904959bf4ff79e48fd8a5d2ca9a68cb

You can easily adapt this code to populate a completely empty dropdown as well.

Filter Item Field Type-Ahead

A few months ago, we put out a blog that demonstrated how to apply a filter to a search dialog. One question we received on this post was how to apply the same filter to the options in the type-ahead of the field as well. The sample code below shows precisely how to do that by overriding the call to the server that generates the options for the type-ahead.

gist.github.com/…/af631acc38dc82c045c16d7e87293a43

This sample ensures that only specific, individual Users can be assigned as the creator of a Part. If we compare the clip below to the one at the beginning of this post, we'll notice that Group Identities like Manufacturing are no longer offered.

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