Introduction
Using SharePoint lists and document libraries to store and manage real world entities is an everyday task. We use them to represent lifecycles, projects, stages, events, what not.
And as in the real world, we need to maintain relationships between the different entities. For example, holding a trade show needs careful planning. You must assign and track related tasks. Your project may have subprojects or you might want to connect document to it.
Unfortunately, SharePoint only supports the most basic tools for managing these relationships. In the vast majority of cases it boils down to the ubiquitous Lookup column. You can use use it to point to the parent item from a child item, that's about it. Tracking and maintaining these relationships is a truly daunting task.
That's where Associated Items column of Ultimate Forms can help! You can use the column to create master-detail relationships in SharePoint sites. It works equally well between all kinds of list items and documents.
You can create, view and manage any number of related items associated with any item or document. And you do it directly from within the parent item itself. This is just one way of how it might look:
As you can see, the related items, appear right inside the Display form of the parent. You can choose the exact way of presenting and working with them too:
- Read-only grid with a full context menu. You use the context menu to open items in a pop-up for editing. This works best for when the child list contains more columns that the view in the parent can include.
- Read-only grid with a data entry row - you can add and modify data directly in the parent form. You modify existing items by switching them to edit mode. You will use this option when the view already contains all the editable columns.
- Editable grid - you can add and modify items directly, without switching to edit mode.
- Forms - each child item appears as a subform with the main parent form. This mode allows non-grid appearance, similar to repeating sections.
Now let me just give you a few examples of what you can accomplish using our Associated Items column. The whole experience emphasizes ease of use and speed of configuration.
I'm listing only simple examples. You will find that the product can be helpful in many sophisticated business scenarios!
Many-to-many Relationships
Just imagine managing a list of your partner companies and a list of products. In some of the products Company A is a supplier, but in others it's a client. But you would prefer to manage its details only once. Associated Items column is perfect for such cases.
- Just create a list for Companies and Products. You are free to decide how you want to configure these lists.
- Now create two relationship lists (just regular custom lists with lookup column for both Companies and Products lists). We will call one relationship list i Suppliers and the other - Clients.
- In Companies list create two Associated Items columns. One will be pointing to the Suppliers list (called Supplies) and the other to the Clients list (called Buys)
- In Products list also create two Associated Items columns. One will be pointing to Suppliers list (called Suppliers) and the other - to Clients (called Clients)
And that concludes our configuration. Now you can view the suppliers and the customers for each product. And you can see which products each company supplies and buys from you. Moreover you can see the related items directly from views!
Read and Sign
In regulated environments some documents, such as SOPs, require a read confirmation by the relevant employees. It must occur each time a new version comes out. Proper management and documentation of this formal process is absolutely crucial. Usually such systems take weeks if not months to develop.
But it will only take a few minutes using the Associated Items column!
- Create a User/Group column called Readers in your document library. This is where you specify who should read each document. You can enter both users or groups. When you enter a group, each group member receives a separate task, so you can track each employee individually.
- Create an Tasks list, then replace the default Task content type with our special Associated Task content type. This is a special content type we supply, similar to the built-in Task. The only difference being that it contains additional support for the Associated Items column.
- Enter the settings page of Ultimate Forms by clicking the Design button on the document library's toolbar.
- Create an Associated Items column in the document library pointing to the newly created Tasks list.
- In Actions, add a new manual action of the type Generate Associated Items. This action will appear as a button on the form. User will trigger it to automatically generate a task for each individual user specified in Readers column.
- Create a new form for the document library in Form Designer. Drag all the relevant columns onto the design canvas.
- Drag a Button control, switch its type to Trigger action and pick your Generate associated items action.
- Publish the form when done.
- The implementation is now complete. When you upload a document, you specify the Readers group. Once you are ready to request reading confirmations, you just click the Generate button. The action will then create a separate related task for each user in the group.
- You can track the related tasks from within the document properties or from views.
- You can optionally set the action to run on events as well. For example, you can have a Status column in your document library and set the action to run when the status changes to Ready.
NOTE: you can install the full pre-configured solution here. You can also find it in the Solution catalog section of the app. The solution is available both in SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365) and on premises.
Related Documents
You can enable attachments in any SharePoint list. But can you do the following with attachments?
- Manage document properties
- Check-in/check-out and manage versions
- Assign different related documents to different parts of the list item
- View related documents in parent list views
- Add attachments to other documents
Associated Items column allows you to do all that and more, turning your attachments into full-fledged managed documents. And as an additional advantage, these documents can have their own attachments as well!
To sum things up
Associated Items column is a powerful tool. It helps you turn your SharePoint into a platform for building real life business applications. And it does not require installation of any special tools except your browser! Download a trial version of Ultimate Forms to test drive it yourself.
