List Look up dropdown selections from Nintex form show as text boxes on Assign a task form

Hi @dperani 

To get this to work I think it is important to understand how lookup data is stored in Nintex forms, The value returned to the SP column is not always the required value of the lookup its self as this is stored in NFFormData as XML. 

You can see this by adding in a calculated field pointing at the lookup.

But then if I add in the value stored in the list you can see it is not the same.

Typically the standard is [item ID];#[Value]

it is done this way to allow for items of the same name to be looked up regardless of the value as the ID combined with the value should always be a unique lookup.

This is an issue however as there is no simple way to pass this lookup value to the task item, just passing ‘United Kingdom’ would not work as this is not a valid lookup value passing 187;#United Kingdom should work but doing so is not possible with the standard Sharepoint lookup column.

To make this work we need to use a normal text field to store the lookup value just as the ID (187) and attach the Lookup control on the Nintex form to that field, see below the steps.

Create a single line text field for storing the value.

In the forms designer add a Lookup control to the canvas (don’t use the list lookup column control where it was created in the list settings, use the plain ‘list lookup’ control)

In the settings configure it to store the value in the text field and use ID:

Now when we save this item we see that it will return the ID of the item to the text field. 

So now from the task list I can use this same structure in reverse.

Now when i assign as task the lookup is filled.

Hope this helps