In this series of posts about data relationships between SharePoint lists using Nintex, the built-in solution from Nintex is the Repeating Section form control. The Repeating Section control allows you to build a form-within-a-form solution, however, a limitation is that the detail data is not immediately usable.
In this series of posts about data relationships between SharePoint lists using Nintex, the built-in solution from Nintex is the Repeating Section form control. The Repeating Section control allows you to build a form-within-a-form solution, however, a limitation is that the detail data is not immediately usable.
The Repeating Section control displays line items for a purchase order as a form-with-a-form
The Repeating Section control allow the user to enter line-item details for multiple columns that you specify as the form designer. The end user can click an “Add new row” button to instantly append another line of empty input controls to be entered with the next line of detail.
The user can add new details right in the parent form without a popup or switching to another form. Furthermore, as a designer you can use all the various control types within a repeating section. For instance, I’ve used a drop-down choice for the Unit of Measure, and a Calculated Value field for the Extended Cost which is able to calculate the line total of the current line in the Repeating Section with a formula that multiplies the Quantity and Unit Cost entered by the user.
The downside is that the Repeating Section details are not added to a SharePoint list. This means you won’t be able to report on aggregate results of the detail data. You can bind the Repeating Section to a multiline text column. That should be useful for something, right?
Well…here’s what it looks like.
The LineItems data immediately after saving a Purchase Order is XML
The Repeating Section forms the line-item detail into an XML object. I’ve copied the XML from the list to blow it up in Visual Studio Code so we can see what is happening.
The Repeating Section XML of just three lines of detail
This leap from simple, flat data into an XML object is nothing new. In fact, a lot of data within the depths of SharePoint is stored as object data like this. This type of data storage has the advantage that it can be structured in a hierarchical format with details like the name of the value (not just the value itself), and the type of the value. The specifics of the object data can be highly customized and represent nesting and levels of data that can’t be represented as easily with traditionally structured database relationships.
But is that useful in the context of most business processes where detail data might be better used if it is immediately accessible as a simple list? Maybe not. That is why this series of posts includes the alternatives to the Repeating Section such as Using the Nintex Calculated Value Control to Display Child Line Items and Using a Nintex Workflow to Maintain a Multiline Column with Child Line Items. And that’s why TekDog developed the TekDog Productivity Controls such as the Subform and the Add New button that provide the detail data in a child list out-of-the-box.
If you really need to use the Repeating Section for its highly customizable form, fortunately, you have the option to create a workflow to parse the XML and put the detail values in another list. That will be covered for Nintex for Office 365 in another post, and you can currently find examples for Nintex on-premise.