Understanding Data Form Web Part in SharePoint 2010/ MOSS 2007 – Part 3

If you have not gone through Part -1 and Part -2 of this series, I would recommend you reading it first and then continue reading from here.

Let’s go ahead and add form actions to data form web part.

Open the page that we had left opened in our previous post also open the list in browser. We are going to add email field to the list. I have entered some dummy email addresses to the list items.

Open SharePoint Designer page and add email field to the data form web part.

Now keeping cursor in email field, right click and then select insert column to right.

Now keeping cursor in that column, go to insert tab and select SharePoint controls, form action control button.

The moment you select the button, it asks you what you want to perform when button is clicked. We are going to select custom action.

So what happens is it generates a workflow that is not associated with the list, nor associated with site or not even with list item. It is independent workflow that can be triggered by the button.

It generates a workflow named form actions workflow 1.

Locate the property of button and change the text of button to send email. 

Now we need to make one more change because we are going to send an email to Email field mentioned in that specific list item, hence we first need to convert that field into a label so that we can make the reference of that field in the workflow.

So select the email field, right click that field and select format item as a label and then save the field.

Now locate the Form actions workflow 1 under workflows tab and open it to modify.

Select action - send an email.

And select these users for email and then select workflow lookup for user

Once you are done with this and if you have email server properly set up, then you should be able to send an email by clicking on that button which will send email to Email field mentioned in that list item.