Populating a dropdown with JSON data from a SharePoint column in an unusual way... possible?

Hiya

I am trying an experiment. I have a client operating in a mine site in the middle of nowhere. Internet access is not guaranteed in certain areas of the site.

With that in mind, I have a SharePoint list with columns

Title, AuditType, ControlType, Width and ControlData

All, apart from the Width column are strings at present.

The Title column represents a question, ControlType can be "TextBox", "DropDown", etc

The intent of this list is that it contains a master list of questions, and the app chooses a subset of those questions based on certain criteria (using AuditType). This list has to work in offline scenarios, so I pull this data into a local collection and use SaveData(), just in case the workers are in an area with no wifi/internet.

I then put in a vertical Gallery on the page and set items to filter(MasterQuestions,AuditType=<audit>) and add a textbox and a drodown control to it. Each control is on top of the other (same XY position) I then set the visible property of the textbox and dropdown to:

if(thisitem.ControlType="TextBox",true,false

if(thisitem.ControlType="DropDown",true,false

I set the width property to thisitem.Width

This has the intended effect... the control I want to use is displayed in the gallery. But I was hoping toÂ set the items property for the dropdown to thisitem.ControlData and storeÂ this in JSON format in SharePoint. Then I was hoping to use table() function to create it in the format that dropdown.items expects... ie

DropDown1.Items = table(thisitem.ControlData)

Unfortunately this does not work. I get the error "Cannot use a non-record value in this context".

Unfortunately I cannot use an EditForm because that can only bind to a live datasource and I need to use an in-memory collection as I described above.

Any ideas how I can achieve the end of aÂ gallery with dynamic controls on it without using a dataform? In effect I am emulating that the data form does except against a collection

regards

Paul

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