SharePoint List Lookup Column…!

One of my friend came to me with a question on how to create a SharePoint List Lookup column. He had gone through several approaches (Programmatically and Declaratively) and he was asking for a recommended best practice way. I remembered a bit how I did that before but was not so sure the exact steps. Then I put my hands on and was trying to do a POC and had to spend some time on it. So thought its valuable to blog it so I will have a reference back for my self.

Scenario for my POC was a typical one, Department and Employee Lists. So I want a lookup field inside the Employee list so I can pick Department from a lookup column.

Step 01: Create a list that will contain data for the lookup list. In my case it will be department list and below are the properties of it

List Name = “Departments”

List URL = “Lists/Departments”

Field name that I want to lookup = “Title”

CAML Query to retrieve data for current user…

While working with SharePoint CAML queries, you will need to get current user data. (Retrieve data from a list, that filtered by current logged in user).

There are couple of ways to achieve this requirement.