Use cascading dropdowns with a locked-down list?

[Bloodlvst]

Hey Alex,

Hope you’re doing well. This is just a general question regarding dropdowns.

We have a staffing list currently in Excel accessible only by a few of us. We manually update these values into another list which all of our Sharepoint lists with DFFS refer to in order to select an employee.

However, because it’s tedious to manually update this, we’re thinking of converting the document into its own sharepoint list and directly calling from that. However, the lists access will need to be locked down as most users are not supposed to see the full list as it contains some private info.

Is there any way to use cascading dropdowns if the user doesn’t have read access to the source list? Would vLookup work? I know it’s a longshot but I’m hoping you can confirm yes or no on this one.

Thanks!

[Alexander Bautz]

Hi,
Unfortunately there is no way to query into a list using JavaScript when the user doesn’t have read access. The only option I can think of where this might be possible is to use a SP Designer workflow running with an impersonation step to pull this extra information – but then the user must be able to input a “key” to user in the WF when looking up the correct record to fill in the values in the list item.

Another option could be to create the list with a “difficult” name, and hiding it from browsers in SP Designer (or using this tool). This will not prevent users typing in the correct address to the list accessing it, but it will “obfuscate” it.

Alexander

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