Promoting People Picker Field from InfoPath

Promoting Fields from a people picker in InfoPath to become a metadata column in SharePoint is easy. Just promote the field and you’re done. So why this blogpost? Because the promoted field is as sexy as hell being a column of text. Yeah, you got that right, it ain’t a person column. It is just plain text. Whoa. Great. But I really want it to be a person column, because I need to use it in a workflow or a filter or whatever.

There is a workaround, which might just save the day. It is not elegant but it does work. Kind of. Here is how you do it:

1. Create your form library
2. Create your form
3. Be sure to include your people picker control in your form
4. Publish your form to your form library
5. Go to your form library settings
6. Add another column to your library, choose “person or group” as your column type and choose a nice name for it
7. Blow the dust off of your good old friend, the SharePoint designer
8. Create a new list workflow for your form library
9. Add the “Update List Item”-Action from the “List Item Actions” group to your workflow
10. A dialog appears. Choose “Current Item” in the dropdown-box at the top
11. Click the “Add” button and in the upper dropdown box choose your newly (you remember step 6, don’t you?) created column
12. In the lower field choose the name of the promoted InfoPath field by clicking that tiny “fx” button, choosing “Current Item” and then the name of the promoted field
13. You might wanna configure your workflow to run automatically every time a new item is created in your form library or every time an existing item is changed, or both.

Thats it. It ain’t beautiful. But it works. I promise. It works in SharePoint 2010 & 2013 with InfoPath 2010 & 2013.