InfoPath Dev

Hi all and forgive me if this has been covered (or is not possible) I am setting up a new hire request form. The form has all the fields you would expect for a new hire--name, title, start date, etc.) I am confident that I could get this to submit to the proper department. However, we also want the users to be able to select which email groups and distribution lists their new hire needs to be subscribed to. Those choices are available by Checkbox. When the creator is done and clicks submit, we would like an email sent to the Helpdesk with the new employee information and a list of the requested groups. At the same time, we would like an email sent to the owner of the group/distro requesting permission to add the new person to their list. To complicate matters, it is possible for someone owns more than one list. In a perfect world they would get one email with request for all of their selected lists. Is it possible? Is it reasonable? Or should I look to multiple tools to accomplish this task? Thanks in advance David

So - what are you currently trying? Where does the list of possible groups come from? Where would the group owner information come from?

I'm having to do something similar to this in not too distant the future.

I'm currently looking into whether I can hook directly into my mail server using a web service or something similar so that I can have a 'live' lists of email groups. However, I think I'll take a different approach. Why? In my distribution list OU there are non user email groups i.e. used by scanners etc.There is no intelligence in a default list.

If I export my current distribution list names I can  add some intelligence to the selection i.e. geographic email groups only, or departmental groups, management only groups, pre selected email groups depending on other groups selected and as Hilary has queried you can have a field called Email Owner.

Emails to others could be achieved using a workflow. I think you could also only send 1 email if a person is an Email Owner of more than one group, yet I'll have to play with that one.

Thanks Hilary I had planned to do this through code; however, since you are asking, I get the impression that that may not be the best way to achieve this. My old school programming brain tells me that I should be able to code a Change Event for the checkbox that would trigger an array. That array would be used to build out the mailto string. I am open to a better solution! I appreciate any guidance you can provide. David

You don't have to use code to do this, but it does require some setup.

We use the same type of layout, we have multiple emails to different groups, and each groups can have the an email that is the same as another group.

The way that we solved the problem was by having a Sharepoint list with the name of the group and an email associated with that group. (This allows you to change the email of the group without changing your form)

Within the Infopath form, there is a textbox associated with each group, we have Infopath load the email address from the Sharepoint list for each group on form load.

We use a textbox called EmailList that contains the concatenation of the emails that we need to send to.

When we email, the button used has a rule for each textbox, it checks the email textbox to see if that email exists in the EmailList textbox, if not, add it to the list.

I attached an example of it. (The EmailList textbox part).

You should be able to make it work for your needs, if you choose to use this way.