Answered

Is it possible to change the field displayed in a dropdown in a data table?

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by MJWhite

338

By default, the primary name field in the 'one' table is displayed in a dropdown in the 'many' table. Is it possible to change the field displayed?

I'd read on some other help board that it can be done by changing the Lookup view of the 'one' table (see screenshot), but the person who raised that ticket couldn't get it to work and I can't either. It is a quite a common requirement to want to display a concatenation of two or more fields from another table e.g. Name = Surname, Forename. I can see how to create the calculated field in the 'one' table but I can't see how to display that in a dropdown in the 'many' table.

Categories:

General topics

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (1)

Sort by

Fubar 8,487 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

No. Lookup field will always display the value in Primary Name field - this is by design. Often what you put in the Primary Name field is a concat of other fields.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
MJWhite 338 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Thanks. I would like to be able to put a concat of other fields in the Primary Name field, but the option to create a calculated field via the Behavior property is disabled for the Primary Name field (see screenshot below). I've also tested this on a new table with no changes to design and no data added. Hence, how do you put a concat of other fields in the Primary Name field?

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Verified answer

Fubar 8,487 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Use a Workflow, Plugin, Flow (flow only if it does not need to show up immediately - as it has no real-time option), if it only needs to occur via the user interface you can use JavaScript

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
MJWhite 338 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!
Thanks. This has a bit of an overlap with a topic I raised a few weeks ago re Is there an equivalent of SQL Views in PowerPages to view data across multiple tables? The answer to that was 'you will need to build your query using WebAPI or Fetch and to a custom render of the results'.
Quite often, I will want to both:
View data across a chain of related tables, and
Display that data in a dropdown in a data table
The simplest and very common example of this would be 'Category, Subcategory, Item' and the solution would need to be real-time. The reason for wanting to see it in the data tables and not just the web pages is that I am expecting a lot of data administration to be done in the data tables, not via web pages.

Since I am trying to keep solutions as simple and as low code as possible, what is the easiest way to achieve this?

Was this reply helpful? Yes No