Sharepoint form with linked lists

Question

I am new to Sharepoint and I want to make sure I am on the right path.

I am in a highly restricted environment and would rather do this in Visual Studio but am currently in the position where I have to try to get this to work using just the web interface and Sharepoint Designer.

I have created multiple lists that I plan on using in a relational way. I have designed this to mimic a relational database.

I have been able to link these lists for multiple item views and single item views, but need to be able to create items and modify items and so I need to be able to also link these lists and use them in a form.

Is this even possible? If not, how do I handle updating these items?

Lastly.....

Am I going about this all the wrong way?

Thanks!

Tim

Answer 1

It is possible to do so using visual studio, not sure about SharePoint designer. I've been doing something fairly similar for a client myself however I am able to use visual studio to develop my features and even then it's been a pain.

Part of the issue is that various controls in SharePoint make the assumption about query variables and their meaning to the control (the ListFieldIterator comes to mind on this one). Trying to edit two different list's items on a single page is possible but I don't think it could (or should) be done through the desinger.

Can you get away with two separate forms/pages? If so that makes life much easier where you could do some kind of linking/forwarding between the pages. If you have to have a single page that represents both lists and their many items things get much more difficult. For the later you will almost certainly have to use Visual Studio since you will have to handle quite a bit of the server side logic.

Answer 2

Depends on how restricted you are. If you have access to the server via RDC, you could create these lists bases on a custom schema. All of this can be done using notepad. A possible solution (that i've heard of but never tried): a) Create your feature folder, and 2 schema files b) Get a copy of a basic list schema, engineer it to match your requirements. c) At the bottom of the schema, you can specify which aspx page is called when i) editing ii) viewing the list. Look at the default out of the box page that is usually referred to, make a copy (customblabla.aspx) and point your list schema to that file (obviously store it along with the out of the box aspx file.

Since you have control over this aspx file, you may able to tweak it do exactly what you want.

Sorry if this doesn't work...