Polishing a lookup field. You have probably added countless lookup fields to forms but, do you then polish them to look good?

There are a number of things you can do to improve the user experience. Lets have a look at the following scenario on a contact record

What do we know about the lookups?

  • Sector is also on the Account
  • Department / Area has no constraints when being populated
  • Department / Role links with the Department / Area record

What can we do?

When you click on the sector field and click on the magnify glass you will see all items
  • Open the form editor in classic view
  • Double click on the sector field
  • Amend the field properties as shown below
Tick to disable the most recently used items
Set the filtering so that only the sector on the account is visible
  • Save and Publish to push the changes through
When you click on the sector field and click on the magnify glass you will see the item that is the sector of their company

So the changes we just made means that is there is a sector in the account, this will be the default available for selection.

QUICK TIP: to turn off the filter the quickest way is to put an * in the lookup field

Use the concept above, disable the most recently used and apply that to the Department / Role field, we are linking this to Department / Area

This will now look like…

So here we have just 2 small tricks to make the lookup on a form a little ‘neater’ as well as save the user time and improve data quality.

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