InfoPath Dev

Yep you guessed it. Another InfoPath 2003 (IP2k3) newbie here. Anyway...

I was recently volunteered to create a new performance review form for my company using IP2k3. The form includes a rating scale section for core competencies and I have been ask to have the form "pop-up" / display an area of examples when a user clicks on the competency description text. What I was hoping to do was use a hyperlink & anchor tag combo. Unfortunately, the hyperlink control  does not look promising.

Example of rating scale table

Competency	1	2	3
Competency 1	(rb)	(rb)	(rb)

When a user clicks on "Competency 1" the form would jump to a section that displays some examples for that competency. Other possibilities could be to open a pop-up or toggle the visiblity of a section / row displaying the examples. I am not a fan of using pop-ups but will consider using if that is my only option.

 BTW, I am using Jscript, so if the answer is to "code it" please provide example code that I can "borrow," I mean re-use. 

 Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, and welcome:

Instead of a link, I would use a button and tweak out the formatting to make it look like a link (remove borders and shading and change the font color and underline). I'd add another field to my data source (or a secondary data source, if needed) called something like ShowHide. The button could have a rule to set a field's value (ShowHide) to something like "Competency 1". I'd add a section directly below each button and conditionally format it to hide if ShowHide is not equal to Competency 1 (for your first example) and put all my text in there.

Add another button in the section that looks like a link and says "Hide". It can set ShowHide back to blank (which will hide your section). This can make for a long form when you are designing (which can be a bit of a pain to work with) but should be a nice experience for the user, since they can have control over what they are seeing w/out dealing with popups, switching views, etc.

Let me know if you need more information or if I wasn't clear enough, okay?

Thanks for the help. Using a couple of buttons, a section and some code I was able to make it work better that I originally envisioned.

On a secondary note, could you point me in a direction of a good Jscript reference?

I tend to go to MSDN for the InfoPath specific stuff, particularly here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb230145.aspx 

I also like W3Schools a lot for general javascript/xml/xpath etc. guidance: http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

Glad you are pleased with your results!

Thanks again.