Parent & Child SharePoint Lists

I’ve seen a few posts on LinkedIn about Parent and child SharePoint lists recently, so I thought I would cover them as a topic in this blog.

So, what are Parent and Child SharePoint Lists…

They are a way of creating a relationship between two or more lists in SharePoint. They allow you to store and display related data in a hierarchical structure, such as tasks and subtasks, orders and items, or projects and milestones.

To create a parent and child relationship, you need to use a lookup column in the child list that references the ID or title of the parent list item. This way, you can link each child item to a specific parent item, and filter or group the child items by the parent values.

For example, I have a list of Projects in a SharePoint list called Contoso Projects:

I also have a list of tasks in another SharePoint list called Contoso Project Tasks:

At the moment, I wouldn’t know which tasks are for which project, which is where we can now setup the Parent and Child lists, to do this, you will need to add a lookup column.

1.Select Add Column

2. Select Lookup from the column types list, followed by clicking Next.

3. Enter the name of the column, in the example I have it set to Project Name, Select the Parent SharePoint list, and then select the column you wish to add in, when you have done that, click Save.

4. You can assign each task to a project by selecting the project title from a drop-down menu.

Very simple setup, but you can go onto create a view in the tasks list that groups the tasks by the project title, or even use a web part to display the tasks for each project on a separate page.