How to: Implement a Threaded History field in a Groove Form

In a recent query on our discussion list, we found an interesting request:

Miles writes,

"I’ve been using Microsoft Office Groove 2007 to implement a tool that my team uses to track code reviews. We created a form for a code review response and people create threaded discussions using these forms.

A current usability problem is that when creating a new response, you can’t see the context of the thread you are responding to. If you need the context, you need to open up another view of the code review tool.

I’m hoping that there might be a way around this problem if I can make a new field on my Response form called “Thread History”. This would be a read only field which would be populated with the rest of the thread. Is there a way to do this?"

Josh, Senior Consultant in the Groove Incubation Practice (a group that's part of Microsoft Consulting Services) responds with a quick and easy way to provide context to the previous post you are responding to (not to the highest, or parent, level of the thread).

  1. Open the Groove Forms DesignerAdd a new field that would show on the response form.
  2. Set the Inherit from property to the field that holds the information to display.

Josh suggests that a script to "walk the thread chain, grab field data, and then dynamically display the information on the form" is a more elegant solution to the problem providing more detailed context than just the previous level up. This is what Miles ultimately wants; the whole threaded hierarchy.

Anyone up to the scripting challenge?

Link to this Article:
https://blogs.technet.com/groove/archive/2007/03/23/how-to-implement-a-threaded-history-field-in-a-groove-form.aspx