Required Lookup
Today I had a requirement to make a lookup field required and set the default value. For a lookup field this isn’t possible within the SharePoint 2010 interface.
My solution
Programmatically the SPFieldLookup also doesn’t have the options available. However casting the Lookup to an SPField does the trick.
public overridevoid FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
try
{
SPWeb web = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent;
SPList list = web.Lists["MyList"];
SPField lookup = (SPField)list.Fields["My Lookup"];
lookup.DefaultValue = "1;#Value 1";
lookup.Required = true;
lookup.Update();
}
catch(Exception Ex)
{
// do what ever you want
}
}Discover more from SharePains
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Pieter Veenstra
Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com
Where do I place this? We have a user that is asking for this requirement
Hi Adrian,
You would need to do this in a feature receiver. So you will need to Create a new feature in Visual Studio and add the code in this post to the FeatureActivated method.
Are you happy using Visual Studio or is this something you need help with?
Pieter
I’ll try with VS, I was hoping for a non-deploy solution. Such as one that could be placed in a CEWP
I guess it is just as easy to use PowerShell.
How about something like this:
web = Get-SPWeb $webUrllist = web.Lists.TryGetList("MyList")
lookup = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPField]list.Fields["My Lookup"]
lookup.DefaultValue = "1;#Value 1"
lookup.Required = true
lookup.Update()
I didn’t test the above code but it should be ok.