The CorasWorks Platform supports two types of lookups, SharePoint Lookup Columns and CorasWorks Workplace Lookups. SharePoint Lookups allow you to work with data from the same site. CorasWorks Workplace Lookups, on the other hand, allow you to pull information from across any SharePoint site or even from external data. Workplace Lookups are available as part of the CorasWorks Platform Advanced components.
A CorasWorks Workplace Lookup is a customized column that can be added to a list, allowing the creation of a child view of data contained in any list in any location, whether that list is from SharePoint, SQL, RSS, or any other list that outputs to XML. You can even create a custom list that is completely populated by information located outside of your SharePoint environment.
When an action is defined via the Actions Wizard, the lookup columns can be referenced. The appropriate control is used to allow either single or multiple selections, depending on how the column is defined. SharePoint Lookups allow multiple selections, CorasWorks Workplace Lookups do not.
When a Create List Item or Publisher action is executed and it transfers values from a Lookup column to a Single Line of Text column, additional characters that are not needed for the action are “trimmed.” (E.g., “2;#MyValue” is modified so that just “MyValue” is placed in the destination column.)
The Actions Wizard, Grid Display, Calendar Display, and Action Launcher all support the selection of multiple values in both SharePoint Lookup and Person or Group data types. If a column is configured to allow multiple values or selections, then a user can select one to many values from the Lookup, Person, or Group.
Because the data referenced by Workplace Lookups comes from an external source, performance may be impacted. This is an important point to consider, particularly when using action definitions that reference lookups. Each time the action is executed, it has to go out and retrieve all of the possible values, which can take time; the data retrieval occurs when the action is executed. This could have an effect on performance, since it relies on another system’s or product’s ability to provide the data.
As a result, as you begin to use lookups, you may want to limit:
•The number of items returned by the lookup
•The number of lookup columns referenced in a single action
•The number of actions that reference lookup columns that are available via a single Grid or Calendar Display