Rant: MS SharePoint 2010 Hiding Lookup Item and Webparts Contradiction

Each passing month, I seem to hate SharePoint more and more. I thought I was smart to find a solution to hiding items from the lookup, but of course the other other side effects that you do not think about until later when you need the same information.

The latest episode is that I have finally a list long enough where it is worth hiding. If you had read my previous post, you'll find that you can no longer use calculated fields to hide items from the lookup list in the latest 2010 patch. So, I made a manual field just for display purposes. It is kind of dumb that you enter the same info twice but at least I had a way to control the lookup list... or so I thought.

So now the problem is when I clear out that field, I can no longer use web parts to display the "child" items into the parent list item. If I repopulate the field, the child items return back to display. The reason I thought this would have worked is because I used the Connections to value from the actual column that I thought it would attach to.

For example, I have columns DisplayText and LookupText. Initially, I have DisplayText and LookupText as "Release 1". When in the child item, there will be an item "Release 1". I add a few child items to "Release 1". On the parent item, I have added a web part to view the child lists. The connection I used was to compare the values in the lookup field with DisplayText (even though I use LookupText for the lookup field). Now when viewing the parent item, I will see the associated child items.

Later I clear out LookupText, the child item will not see "Release 1". By doing this, the parent item view with the web part to view child lists now will be empty. EMPTY?! WHY!?

Anyways... this is more of a rant because I just stayed up all last night because someone there were issues with the install process and the on-call resources could not be found or at least the proper on-call resources. I just do not understand why I cannot just do a simple relationship between two views in 2014. Or why an international corporate company cannot afford an enterprise sharepoint or even allow an inhouse server to host the data that we are managing, especially when we provide a cloud service which does not even need new hardware... the questions of why's are endless.