Turn a lookup into a picklist

Tags: apex, Development, force.com, visualforce
By joe, Sep/29/2009 in Development | 2 Comments »

I’ve had several clients “voice concerns” about Salesforce.com’s lookup functionality relative to user acceptance. Well, if you’re dealing with a relatively simple lookup table, you can override an object’s new/edit page with a Visualforce page and display the lookup field to the user as a picklist.

In the [live Visualforce] example below, the user is creating a new “Some_Object__c” record. The Some_Object__c object is very simple: it’s comprised of a standard name field and a custom lookup to another table called “Location__c”. Location__c is comprised of name, city, and state fields and there are only 8 rows in the table. Rather than having the user click the magnifying glass icon to lookup to the Location__c table, one can quite easily display a list of possible values to the user along with any other pertinent information (in this case, I’m displaying Location__c’s City__c and State__c fields as well).

public class SomeObjectExtension {
	private final ApexPages.standardController controller;

	private final Some_Object__c obj;

	public SomeObjectExtension(ApexPages.StandardController stdController) {
		this.controller = stdController;
		this.obj = (Some_Object__c)stdController.getRecord();
	}

	public SelectOption[] getLocationOptions() {
		SelectOption[] locations = new SelectOption[]{};
		locations.add(new SelectOption('','--None--'));
		for (Location__c l : [select id, name, city__c, state__c from location__c where isdeleted = false order by name]) {
			locations.add(new SelectOption(l.id, l.name + ' (' + l.city__c + ', ' + l.state__c + ')'));
		}

		return locations;
	}
}

<apex:page standardController="Some_Object__c" extensions="SomeObjectExtension" showHeader="false" >
	<apex:sectionHeader title="Some Object Edit" subtitle="New Some Object" />
	<apex:form id="someObjectForm">
		<apex:pageBlock title="Some Object Edit" mode="edit">
			<apex:pageBlockButtons >
				<apex:commandButton action="{!save}" value="Save"/>
			</apex:pageBlockButtons>
			<apex:pageBlockSection title="Some Object Information" columns="1">
				<apex:inputField value="{!Some_Object__c.Name}" required="true"/>
				<apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
					<apex:outputLabel value="{!$ObjectType.Some_Object__c.fields.Location__c.label}" for="pLabel"/>
					<apex:outputPanel styleClass="requiredInput" layout="block">
						<apex:outputPanel styleClass="requiredBlock" layout="block"/>
						<apex:actionRegion >
							<apex:selectList id="locationLookupPicklist" value="{!Some_Object__c.Location__c}" size="1" rendered="true">
								<apex:selectOptions value="{!locationOptions}"/>
							</apex:selectList>
						</apex:actionRegion>
					</apex:outputPanel>
				</apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
			</apex:pageBlockSection>
		</apex:pageBlock>
	</apex:form>
</apex:page>

Tags: apex, Development, force.com, visualforce

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