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SharePoint Lists: Lookup column, additional fields, new naming convention??

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Posted on by Gianluca

I just discovered there must have been a change in the naming convention of the internal name for Lookup columns, additional fields (?).

My old list shows this as internal name:

...Field=field01_x003a__x0020_ID

while on a newly created list the internal name is now:

...Field=field01_x003a_ID

(the blank after the colon has gone)

Is there a way to rename the internal field to have a blank after the colon?

I am using the same list in different environments (Power Apps app) and I can't have two different naming conventions otherwise the app breaks!

Thanks for any hint!

BTW: Was there some kind of announcement of this change I missed?

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Building Power Apps

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WarrenBelz 153,079 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi Gianluca

The easiest way to avoid all of that is to firstly not create your List from Excel (which is where the field_x reference is coming from). Also Lookup fields are generally a waste of time with Power Apps (I never use them) and in particular the "secondary" fields are not Delegable and have other compatibility issues that make them best avoided.

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BostonSailor 154 on at

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I believe that once the column is created in SharePoint, its internal name cannot be changed. Yes, that can be a real annoyance. The same thing is true with internal names in Power Platform -- internal names of Connection References, Environment Variables, Tables, and pretty much everything. The upside is that you can change the display name to make it prettier and not break your code. The downside is that your code is stuck with these ugly, misleading, or legacy names.

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Gianluca 68 on at

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Hi Warren

Thanks for writing!

The 'field01' didn't come from Excel (I used that feature exactly once ;-)), it was just a placeholder for the fieldname in my post.

While you are correctly stating Lookup fields have some issues, until this strange behaviour I was quite happy with them, but this is a rather small solution I made with 4-5 child lists only.

Finally I had to recreate both lists (dev/qa) from scratch to work around this issue.

BostonSailor

You are right, there's no way to change the internal name. *sigh*

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