InfoPath Dev

Hello everyone,

I'm wondering how this can be done. We were told not to use Sharepoint as a data storage as we might well have > 20.000 submitted forms.
That's why I'm submitting the Xml to a Webservice which in turn stores the infopath xml in a ms sql database.

Now how do I load all those xml files (excel? access? anything else?) to evaluate them? If we were talking about one specific infopath form I could of course easily write an adequate application to parse the xml and generate a report. However I am looking for a more flexible solution to this. It's simply not an option to write a new reporting application for each and every form. If people (the form creators) could evaluate their yielded responses on their own (e.g. using excel) that would be best. In fact it's the only viable solution.

I'm open for any suggestions :-)
tia

DBXL sounds like just what you're looking for.  You can use it to extract data from the XML and into a database as the forms are submitted, and then use Excel's database-querying functionality to process the data whenever you like.

Updating the XML->DB mapping after the forms are submitted (e.g. to extract more data out into new tables or columns) is also a piece of cake.

 I recommend checking out the demo video to see whether DBXL can provide what you want.

http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/DBXL.aspx

The people creating infopath forms in our sharepoint site don't really care how they get their data.. they just want it. They create an infopath form, publish it to sharepoint and at some point in the future they want an excel sheet with all the participants' data.
Now it's kind of difficult to make reports in excel when you have repeating tables or sections inside your infopath form.. that just doesn't mix well with the flat structure of excel sheets. However I simply cannot really expect our end users to map columns or anything - visually, wizard driven or not - .. that's just outside their domain.. they don't want to do that.. and I doubt they are actually capable of doing that.

Also we are not talking about 1-10 infopath forms that are used for years and might be subject to minor changes throughout their lifetime. We are talking about 25-75 forms a month with an average lifetime of 1 month I guess. In our case Infopath is typically used for surveys and related tasks. And our IT department doesn't want to be involved in each and every form analysis.

Since I can only import one XML file into excel at a time I thought about merging all my xml files (could be 50000) into one big file.
Unfortunately Excel doesn't seem to be capable of handling such big files. At some point it just stops importing and miserably reports and error.

Any suggestions?

zartr - did you ever get this working?

 I was asked by a small business owner who is not very technical how he could use Info Path and then write reports based on that information, WITHOUT having to install/configure WSS/SharePoint. He doesn't have the luxury of paying for development or infrastructure - he just wants to know how he can access InfoPath data. I've never used Info Path and not yet sure how/where they're storing all of the xml. I'm guessing that he's out of luck without development help or getting SharePoint? His forms will be much more static than yours - he just needs to customize the report to be "prettier" than the form.

 Thanks to any/all for any help.

Hello mat_hues... if you store all your xmls to a sharepoint library you can export the data to an excel sheet (built in functionality of a forms library). However we store our xmls in a database and therefore cannot use this tool. And since we are talking bout several thousands of xmls we cannot open every single one of them and view them in infopath and evaluate them manually.

That's why I wrote my own generic infopath xml parser which dynamically analyzes the structure of the xmls and puts them all into one excel sheet for evaluation purposes.