SharePoint Fun

Let’s talk about validation and the PeopleEditor control. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how this is supposed to be done so I’ll outline my findings and what eventually worked for me.

I’ll start by explaining what I was attempting to do. I have a PeopleEditor control on a custom application page. My custom application page is located in the _layouts directory. On this page, I also have a submit button that saves my data to a SharePoint list upon submit.

Now, I need to ensure before submit, that the PeopleEditor control contains a valid entry. Blank and invalid values are not permitted.

I first attempted to set the AlllowEmpty property to false. However, that didn’t seem to help. If I clicked submit, the page would post back and then the control would display an error once the page reloaded. At this point, it was too late to be informing the user that there was a problem with their entry, the page had already posted back, so this was not useful.

I also tried setting the ValidationEnabled property to true. That didn’t seem to make any difference either. I am confused as to how these two properties are supposed to work.

My next attempt was to add an ASP.NET required field validator to the page as follows:

1
2
3

<wssawc:PeopleEditor AllowEmpty="false" ValidatorEnabled="true" Width="250px" ID="pePR" runat="server" SelectionSet="User" MultiSelect="false" />
 
<asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="rfvPR" ControlToValidate="pePR" runat="server" ErrorMessage="Project Requestor (Cannot be blank)" Text="Cannot be blank." ValidationGroup="SubmitForm" Display="Dynamic"></asp:RequiredFieldValidator>

This took care of the client side validation that prevented the user from clicking submit without first entering a value into the control.

However, this did not handle the scenario when a user entered an invalid value in the control and hit submit. In this case, the form will attempt to submit and create the item, but will fail to save the value to the list item field because the value was invalid. An example of an invalid value would be bad data in that field.

To fix this, in my submit method, I added an IF statement to check how many resolved entities there were.

1
2
3
4
5
6

if (pePR.ResolvedEntities.Count > 0) {
    // continue with the submit
}
else {
    // output an error that the user did not enter a valid user
}

If anyone has any feedback, or has had success using the AllowEmpty property, please comment on this post or drop me a note. I’m interested in hearing how others were able to get around this issue.