InfoPath Dev

 Hi, so I am building a timesheet system and I have an InfoPath form (from a sharepoint list - Timesheet entries) that is trying to do a filtered lookup to another sharepoint list, in order to populate a dropdown (available work packages). The list it looks up is very basic and has the fields Workpackage name (Text), assigned to (People look up) and active (Yes/No),

So I built the data connection and ticked these three fields and the last tick box to load the data when the form opens.

Up to now it was working fine and I was merrily filtering the dropdown by comparing the account id of the person who created the entry to the assigned to field contents. This has now gone live however as the users have now populated the available work packages list to such an extent with loads of people per work package it is now falling foul of the data connection size limit of 1500kb. (I cannot change this as Im using 2013 versions on office 365)

 

Therefore I was thinking to filter the data connection before getting the data by setting the query fields first. However the "Assigned to" field (People look up) is not appearing in the query fields section for me to set.

Any ideas as to why it's not there, I did tick it when setting up the dataconnection from the sharepoint list?

Many thanks 

 

It isn't in the query fields because it is a complex type, I believe. It is odd - if you select Created By or Modified By (which are also People), you can query. But if you create a connection to a task list (for example) and select Assigned To, you can't! I'd probably just add another column to the list for the account id (or email, whatever you need to query on) for the Assigned To - and then use MS Flow to populate it when the item is created or modified. The Flow would be pretty simple, and should run fast.... I guess that still leaves you with all your existing data, but you could set up the same Flow with a time recurrence and then just run it one time to get all the fields populated.

 Many thanks Hilary, I'll use your solution

 Hi Hilary,

 I'm working on getting subsets from data connections and I'm having the same problem described in this post.  I have 2 text fields that are nearly identical with the exception, field B is in a non-repeating section and the other, Field A is under the myFields root.  Both fields are in the data connection's data fields but Field A is not in the query fields.  Any idea why?  I need this field to query on. 

 I think my problem is that Field A is a multiple lines of text field. I can't change it to a single line because of data loss due to some records contain data that exceeds the limit of a single line of text field.  I'll need to find another way of getting my subset to search this field. 

Yup, you guessed it - can't have a multiple line of text field as a query field.

 Hi, the way I got around these things is a quick workflow to copy the particular field to a single line of text field and then queried on that.

Cheers