InfoPath Dev

I've been trying to figure out if what I'm trying to do is possible with InfoPath.  Everything I've read leads me to believe that it is, but the numerous ways that people use InfoPath have been confusing the issue for me.  Here's what I want to do:

I have a form that will be used by people in the field to record information that will be saved to the hard drive of a tablet PC until they get back to the office.  Once back, they can merge the forms and submit them to the database (Access 2003).  What I want is for them to be able to update the options available in the dropdown lists on the form with data from some lookup tables in the database.  I want those values to be cached as xml files on the tablet PC so that when the form is not able to connect to the database, it will use those xml files for the dropdown lists.

None of this really needs to be automatic.  I think that having a button on the form to update the lists from the database is fine.  The user hits the button, the xml files get updated to match the database lists, the form continues to use the XML files as the data sources for the dropdowns, and everything is fine.

I just don't know how to update the XML files to match the database lists.  Is there some how-to article on that somewhere?  Surely this has been done before, right?

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks!

- Kris

 

Hi Kris,

This is defintiely possible.  I still would recommend DBXL and SQL over Access if multiple users are sharing the data and there is going to be merging of the data.

One approach would be to have each tablet have a copy of the Access DB and then merge them back to a central DB.  This could be fairly easy with SQL and DTS but I am not familiar with merging multiple Access DB's on a regular basis.

The offline part can be done a couple different ways. If it is just for drop-down menus I would think you could set up the form to use the XML file(s) as secondary data sources and set them up to load them each time the form opens.  You could put these on a network share and have the tablet users set them up for off-line access.  This way when on-line it is grabbing the network copy and when off-line they get the last synchronized copy.  Then you can update these centrally and everyone will get the update the next time they sync.  As far as automating the central copy to be updated from the access database I am sure their is some way to export this data.  With SQL you could automate it I am not sure with Access. You could probably make a macro that you could run that would update the XML file(s) but I think this is streatching Access a bit and would still require some manual intervention.

The last posibility is Groove. I have looked at this for a similar situation with Home Health Nurses, and the data they needed was in SharePoint. With Groove you can even take SharePoint off-line and then sync again.  You would have to look at your particular situation.

Those are my thoughts.