The Fall 2007 release of the Suite supports two types of lookups, SharePoint Lookup Columns and CorasWorks Workplace Lookups.
• SharePoint Lookups allow you to work with data from the same site.
• CorasWorks Workplace Lookups allow you to pull information from across any SharePoint site or even from external data. Workplace Lookups are available as part of the new CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset, which is available for purchase separately from the Workplace Suite. If you have not purchased the Toolset, then CorasWorks Workplace Lookups are not available to you, but SharePoint Lookup Columns are.
A CorasWorks Workplace Lookup is a customized column that can be added to a list, allowing the creation of a child view of data contained in any list in any location, whether that list is from SharePoint, SQL, RSS, or any other list that outputs to XML. You can even create a custom list that is completely populated by information located outside of your SharePoint environment. For more information on Workplace Lookups enabled by the Toolset, please refer to the CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset Guide or contact CorasWorks at info@corasworks.net.
Active Displays support the display of lookup column values, just as they would any other column. If you use a Workplace Lookup to combine multiple columns of data from the source, it can be displayed as a single value (e.g., Susan Brown – Operations). This can be particularly helplful to add qualifying content if, for example, the data may include two people with the same name.
In addition, Active Displays support the selection of multiple values in both SharePoint Lookup and Person or Group data types. If a column is configured to allow multiple values or selections, then a user can select one to many values from the Lookup, Person, or Group.
Because the data referenced by Workplace Lookups comes from an external source, performance may be impacted. This is an important point to consider, particularly when using action definitions that reference lookups. Each time the action is executed from an Active Display, it has to go out and retrieve all of the possible values, which can take time; the data retrieval occurs when the action is executed. This could have an effect on performance, since it relies on another system’s or product’s ability to provide the data.
As a result, as you begin to use lookups, you may want to limit the number of actions that reference lookup columns that are available via a single Active Display.