SharePoint Mulitple Field (Connected) Lookups

Another project, another roadblock thrown up by SharePoint.
We needed the ability to look up multiple values off of one field-basically we needed a Phone, Fax, email based off of a name. This is where Codeplex comes into play, and the Connected Lookups Solution that Leonid Lyublinski of Microsoft created, fits in with this need.

This solution creates a new Column Type for your list, Connected Lookup Field, that uses the basic lookup functionality and upgrades it considerably. It creates a "Parent Column" that is the reference point for the subsequent "Value Columns". This is what it looks like:


There are some limitations in regards to list size (1000 items seems to be the most it can handle) as well as some nesting issues that Leonid references here.

The Code itself is available for Download from Codeplex here. It is an automated install, very simple to perform, and once it is installed, very easy to use.

"Name Active X Control" component prompt in IE for external facing web sites

Here is something new I had not come across before, so I'm posting it for my reference as well as hopefully helping others who may run into this........

Recently I was involved with creating a new web site for my company in SharePoint. After running through dev and UAT environments we moved it to production and turned it on to the outside world. As soon as we did, an alert regarding a "Name Active X Control" started appearing on many of our browsers. (Of course only the IE flavors 7 and 8- Firefox, Chrome and Opera were fine.) After browsing around a bit looking for the issue I found this Microsoft KB entry.

The KB article suggests 2 steps to solve, one add the site to the trusted site list, this is the reason we missed this in testing, our UAT and Dev environments were internal intranet sites, automatically trusted by the browsers. (As you can imagine we have changed our QA process) The second step is involving editing the init.js Java Script and renaming the file and calling that new file something other than init.js.

The root cause is SharePoints' presence awareness, but as other blogs (Thanks to Mossman - I'd do a link but for some reason the blog post seems to have vanished) have stated you'd think they'd come up with a more specific name rather than the spooky sounding name.dll.