Can we created drill-downs in New List Item form?

Hi,

I have a requirement for a list where two columns are related and I want to show possible values upon selections:

e.g. I have Continent, Country field. So, when I select the Continent field I need to display only the countries related to that continent while creating a new list item.

Is there any way I can achive this using Out-Of-Box MOSS 2007 or using SPD??

Thanks!

What you want is a cascading drop down. It's in the ASP.NET Ajax framework, but I found this tidbit that might interest you.

http://alexcnichols.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/dynamic-cascading-drop-down-lists-in-sharepoint/

Thanks Chris. Couple of more questions:

1) Can I do this without coding? Using SPD?

2) Do I need to have MOSS 2007 server installed on my local PC to use the SharePoint object model? What if I need to use SharePoint web services to do the same as I don't have MOSS 2007 server on my development PC? Can I create items using SPD as well using custom .asp form?

Thanks!

Well you'll defintely need to code, and remember that SPD is a coding application it just has some no-code features.  You can create custom ASP.NET content in there (aspx).

All you need for the object model is at least the .NET 3.0 framework, but you'll need a virtual machine to test.

Thanks for clarification. I am still unclear about your second statement.

If I am developing a code for SharePoint, do I need SharePoint server installed where I am developing the code? For testing I know we need to deploy the code to Server.

I have seen weird errors during compilation when developing code on a machine that doesn't have SharePoint server.

So my question is simple, to code & compile successfully the page/application from my .NET using SP Object model do I need SharePoint server??

Thanks!

I could be wrong, but I don't believe that SP has to be on the machine that you're developing because the APIs are in the framework that can be installed with SP.  Now considering that, I would imagine that well over 99% of all development environments for SP have it installed.

Did that all make sense?

Chris,

I got what you were trying to say. I will be installing VS 2008 with SP1 next week and see whether I can use object model from there not. As per my understanding we require MOSS 2007/WSS v3 if we want to develop some custom code but just need confirmation if somebody has a firm answer to that.

The best possible solution for this need is to create custom fields.  Look into the SharePoint API; SPField class and you will find ways of creating your own fields.

 Hi Shalin,

The following links should/can help you if you want to develop SharePoint code without having MOSS or WSS installed on your dev machine. Let us know how it works out for you :)

http://random-thunks.com/2007/04/installing-wss-30-sdk-on-xpvista.html

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

Good luck!

Erik

 I installed VS 2008 with SP1 and conclusion is that: We cannot run the application built on MOSS on a server witout it. The object model is designed such a way. We need to use Web Services for the same.

Here is a MSDN post for the same: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/ba1902ee-393e-474c-abf0-aecd195d3f0b/

@shalinparmar: Thanks for the clarification!