InfoPath Dev

Hi

I have a library with 2000+ forms within in it.  We promote a number of fields when we submit to the library, but we have realised that we would like to promote another one to SharePoint.

I can promote the field, then relink the documents, but this will mean ticking the relink box 2000+ times.

Is there another way to access the data from the forms? We are basically just trying to report across 5 fields from all of the existing forms.

Thanks

Darryl

Hi Darryl,

Working with documents in a SharePoint library can be tricky - I feel your pain on having to re-link all those documents to get the data to show.  SharePoint 2010 has the option to re-link all at once which is nice but I think you must have 2007?  You might be able to check out and check in documents to get the same result, that could be faster if you can do them in groups rather than 1 at a time.

We do actually offer some tools that you might find very helpful when working with InfoPath forms.  For example we have a tool called DBXL that can report on your InfoPath data, we even have a desktop version of this tool (no server install required).  I put a demo video of the tool together, you might find this intersting to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSBySdG8VLY

A very common request we get from customers is how to report on their repeating data in InfoPath and with our DBXL tool you can actually do reporting on repeating data out of InfoPath using SQL, it's quite powerful.

Feel free to send me a private message if you would like more information or a demo of our tools.

Ted

Hi Ted

Many thanks for the video link.  The tool looks really good.

Can you please tell me whether it relies on the fields being promoted?  If so, would it require fields to be promoted from the outset, or could I simply promote my fields now, then report using DBXL?

Thanks again

Darryl

Hi Darryl,

I got your email inquiry about pricing, I will reply to that email shortly.

Regarding the promoted properties, DBXL doesn't care about promoted properties - you can map any field in your form to SQL via our tool so you can do reporting totally independent of SharePoint promoted properties.  Many of our customers find that promoting properties in SharePoint is best for allowing users to sort/filter/group their forms so they only promote fields that are used for this purpose and then they use DBXL for reporting, the reporting fields might be totally different fields than what is needed in SharePoint.

Ted