InfoPath Dev

I've been working on a monster form with 8 views and hundreds of checkboxes that control the state of a view with a repeating table.

I encountered the Conditional Presence vs. Conditional Visibility issue in after the data source was complete, but while I was only midway through creating all of my views with their various sections and checkboxes.

The basic XML of the form reached almost 2 MB before any of the actual semantic information was entered when I attempted to go the conditional visibility route.

I found an article on the InfoPath blog that tells me how to do conditional presence (that is, inserting optional sections of checkboxes based on the values of other checkboxes). So that's one problem sort of solved.

But... If I go with conditional presence/insertion over conditional visibility how badly am I going to trash run time throughput considering my 7-9 levels of recursion and hundreds of checkboxes that control all of this? Development throughput is already trashed (literally clocking my Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz with 1 GB memory, almost clocking my Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz with 1 GB memory)...

Is there another approach that I should be considering, or do I just have to live with it and tell everyone to get a really fast CPU?

Thanks in advance for any advice you have to offer,
Jean K.

Wait a minute, your XML output is 2 MB or your XSN template? template would be be expected to be that big, but your output....? Can you confirm?

Regards,

Franck Dauché

Yes. The actual XML file was 2 MB when I tried to do conditional visibility - and that was all form workflow/state XML - not the actual information we're trying to capture. That's why I was really happy to find that I could insert the sections on an as needed basis. The XML file is much smaller now.

But now I've got a lot more code to write - first to control the presence or absence of other checkboxes, and second to insert rows in that repeating table I keep talking about.

Please let me know you need further clarification.

Thanks,
Jean K.

Do you have attachments in there? Because I have dealt with forms that had schemas with more than 50,000 nodes, and the XML output was not even close to that...
Anyway, if you have optional sections, the xml output will contain only the sections that were added. In case you use conditional formatting to Hide sections, the output will be the same, so the size of your xml won't change.
To increase performance, make sure that you split your data into Views and if you need to write code behind, you need to fire 1 single OnBeforeChange event and 1 single OnAfterChange event for the entire form, else your performance is going to decrease...fast.

You should read:http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=618 (especially the link that Jason added at the end) to make sure that you are not getting off track.

Franck

Believe it or not, no. No attachments. Just hundreds of checkboxes all defaulted to "0" awaiting their chance to be part of the current state...

Thanks for the heads up on the article for improving throughput. I'll go through and see what I can do.

Thanks again.

Hi Jean,

If you are not under any NDA, I would love to see your schema...maybe I can help there. You can find my email address in my profile if you are willing to do that.

Good luck.

Franck