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How to render lookup as dropdown in Powerpage

Inkey, October 1, 2024 489 Views

In today’s digital landscape, creating user-friendly interfaces is essential, especially when building applications using Microsoft Power Portal. One common requirement is to render lookup fields as dropdown menus, enabling users to select from a predefined set of values. This functionality enhances the user experience by making data entry more intuitive and efficient. In this blog, we will explore how to achieve this, ensuring your Power Portal applications are both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Understanding Lookups in Power Portal

Lookups are crucial for establishing relationships between different entities in a database. In Power Portal, they can be presented as dropdowns, allowing users to easily select related records without needing to type or search manually. This not only streamlines data entry but also reduces errors by ensuring that users select valid entries.

Steps to Render Lookups as Dropdowns

So here you can see we have a form for case, which contains a look up of Customer that the case relates to, the default behavior on the portal is to render a lookup as you can see

Below, however, in this case we want to render the lookup as a drop down instead

To change the behaviour of our lookup on this form navigate to basic forms in Power Portal Management form.

Open the basic form you are need to render the lookup as dropdown, in my case I have opened the case form, In the form go to the tab Basic Form Metadata

Create a new Basic form metadata, select the Type as Attribute and Control type as Render Lookup as Dropdown, lastly select the Attribute name you need to render as a lookup.

Save and sync the configuration on the site and voila!! The Lookup is Rendered as shown below.