How do I get my contact list into a Sharepoint form?

April 21, 2009 1:56 PM

I have an Infopath form in Sharepoint. In one of the fields I want the user to pick a person from a "contact list" stored in the site. I want it to behave like the contact selector control, but this apparently only queries AD and Sharepoint users, not a contact list. Any ideas on how to achieve this?

I don't really need the functionality to create a contact on the fly (this could, theoretically, be a drop down list). But with 700 names it would be nicer if I could provide the contact selector like interface. This seems like it should be really simple to do, I shouldn't have to roll my own here.

posted by geoff. to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Have you tried the SharePoint - InfoPath Forms Services forum on MSDN? It looks like most questions get a response.
posted by tomcooke at 3:22 PM on April 21, 2009

Ah, InfoPath. How many times have I said to myself, "This seems like it should be really simple to do."
I think you have to roll your own. A drop list would be easiest, of course. If you are willing to do some code-behind, you could give the user a text field to enter some search text, click a search button, and then allow them to select an entry from matching results. It's not as clean as the contact selector control, but it doesn't look too bad. If you're interested mail me and I'll forward you a code snippet.
posted by Eddie Mars at 3:50 PM on April 21, 2009

Eddie is InfoPath worth it? Or should I just go ASPX/SQL? I'm getting the feeling is for a power user creating super simple forms in XML?
posted by geoff. at 5:22 PM on April 21, 2009

You are looking at a custom control. Especially if you want to have the same functionality as the selector control (browse and the resolve names). No "easy" way to do it in infopath.

If you can whip up a web form to do this, then you might want to go that route. Your page could even use the contact list as a data source. Code-behind can get ugly quickly, especially if you want your code to do a query against a specific list in SharePoint for validation. It's doable, just hard.
posted by MCTDavid at 6:03 PM on April 21, 2009

I'm dumping the list, inserting into SQL and using web service to create a query and drop down as outlined here. Not too impressed with Infopath.
posted by geoff. at 8:36 AM on April 22, 2009

InfoPath is a bit of a challenge, similar to Sharepoint in many respects. It works great until you try to step outside of what is provided to you. As soon as you get to the point where you need to start coding, everything becomes ridiculously difficult.
If you have an alternative that will work for you, I'd go that route.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:22 AM on April 22, 2009

You can use a Web Service to query your SharePoint list and populate your drop down box in InfoPath with the Web Service.
posted by geekyguy at 7:32 PM on July 16, 2009