Day 42 – and if only this post was the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Sorry – it's just another vNext Wishlist rant.
The Problem
Lookups can become orphaned – lose their connection to the target list that is – for many reasons. Waaaay back on day 29 (you were reading then, weren't you?) I moaned about a couple of these. Another common scenario is caused by the lack of referential integrity – you can easily delete the target list without the source list knowing about it or even getting the opportunity to say goodbye.
Now you might think I'm suggesting the actual problem here is this brutal break-up in the first place, but no, I'm accepting that this might be unavoidable in certain scenarios. The real subject of this particular rant is the inability to remap lookups from the browser. You just get an empty "Get information from:" in the edit page for the column without any additional options or advice.
Possible Solution
Add a "remap lookup" facility to the browser interface to allow lookups to be re-united with their parents, or at least given a new home. I'm imagining you would click a button, then select the new target list. For bonus points, this feature could even detect discrepancies in existing data that no longer matches an item in the target list, and allow those to be wiped, or set to a default, or perhaps even mapped to new values. At the very least, this feature should not automatically wipe the lookup values since the remapping might correct this.
Workarounds (For Now)
Delete then recreate your lookups (if you don't care about or have any existing data – lucky!) Otherwise, see day 29.
:) Matt