By default, a qForm’s Catalog view only downloads metadata –specifically the Name, Author and Description fields. This prevents users from being able to see document fields while still presenting basic information as part of the Catalog view. In order to solve the problem of displaying custom fields in the catalog view, QdCatalogBase offers a promoted properties import mechanism.
Promote the field you wish to expose
1. Navigate to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\QdabraWebService\install and right-click on QdCatalogBase.xsn. Select Design.
2. Select File > Tools > Form Options > Property Promotion.
3. Select the field you wish to promote, making sure to select “first” aggregation. Note: make sure property names do not contain spaces.
Extract the source files for your qForm
4. Select File > Save As Source Files, and select an output directory for the source files.
5. Close InfoPath.
6. Navigate to the folder where the source files were saved and open QdConfig.xml in a text editor such as Notepad.
7. Add an entry to the <CatalogViewMapping> section. Note that the Xpaths should not contain a leading slash (/) or /my:QdCatalog/my:QdForm in them. Be very careful specifying the name/Xpath pairs – most of the issues with promoted properties import come from errors in there. For example, in order to promote the status, with Xpath /my:QdCatalog/my:QdForm/my:field1, enter only my:status. The new line will look like this:
<PromotedPropertyMapping name="PromotedField" xpath="my:field1" />
8. Save and close QdConfig.xml.
9. Right click on manifest.xsf and select Design. Click on File > Save As and enter a new form name.
Add the field into your qForm's Catalog view
10. In InfoPath, open the newly saved form in Design mode and navigate to the Catalog (default) view.
11. Double click on the Author Expression box and change it from Data Source to Text. Enter Field1 in the text box and click Ok. You will see the text Field1 replace the text Author in the form’s column.
12. Double click on the @my:author Expression box and click on the Edit Formula button to the right of the Xpath field.
13. Use on the Insert Field or Group button to change the Xpath from @my:author to @my:status and click OK twice to close all dialogs.
14. Click File > Save and close InfoPath.
Test the modified qForm
15. In DAT, click on New Configuration. Attach the xsn file saved in the previous step and name it. Click Save, and then click OK in the confirmation dialog.
16. Click the Open link under the file attachment control. This will open the Catalog view of your form.
17. Click + Add Document to create a new forms. For the purposes of this example, create various documents with different values in the field1 node. When you return to the Catalog view, you will see each document’s status listed, as shown below.
Additional notes
- Property Promotion works for both qForm and Admin Plus mode but not for the Admin mode.
- There are some DBXL issues handling non-string data types. This can be remedied by editing the manifest.xsf file manually and changing the type to xsd:string.
- In some cases, InfoPath won’t let you promote some properties via UI such as base64 fields. However, it can be done manually by editing the corresponding fields in the XSF.
- If you are promoting a default promoted property, such as Status or Assigned To Name, you do not need to complete the first two sections of the above tutorial (i.e. skip steps 1 through 9 in Promote the field you wish to expose and Extract the source files for your qForm sections).