InfoPath Dev

hello

  I am new to web services.. using IP 2007 with SharePoint 2007 w/ form services... In the end I want this to be a browser form but for now just tryiong to get it to work in InfoPath... My form is using the builtin datasource... The standard submit submits the form to a SharePoitn form library.. No problem there... Now I want to add a button that would be used to perform a submit to a web service... I have created the web service, however eveytime I try to submit data to the web service I get errors that seem to tell me that InfoPath is not putting anything in the web service Parameters... Basically the SQL table mtaches the Infopath form structure so I want to pass the values of the form into the SQL table through the web service.. I have tried adding web service parameters for each field in the document and linking each field directly to each parameter... When attempting to use the parameter in the web serivce I get "Server was unable to process request. ---> Object reference not set to an instance of an object."... I have also tried changing it to a single parameter and submitting the entire xml document... No matter what I do the parameters are empty... Any help would be appreciated...

Hi JSherman and welcome,

Have you converted your Web Service data connection into a UDC connection? Can you try debugging this with the rich client first? Otherwise, I'm afraid we'd have to look at your Web Service and the form. Or, you could quickly install a free trial version of DBXL (Qdabra's Web Service) that will integrate your form with SQL using a data mapping (i.e. no code).

I finally ended up getting it to submit... I was testing using the rich client... It ended up being that name space on the web service... I had it set to a name for the web service.. Infopath seemed to be submitting using a standard MS one... For some reason it wouldn't map the data... After I changed the namespace on my Infopath datasource to the same as my namespace it worked...

One question though.. Is this the best method of handling this?? Because now my data source in Infopath is locked in the GUI, assuming if I want to change it I would need to re-import a modified xml datasource..

Glad to hear you got it working.

UDC files are the best practice if you have SharePoint. If you don't have SharePoint, you can still use UDC files but it's slightly more complicated.
Bottom line: using UDC files allows you to abstract the data connection which makes it no longer hardcoded in the InfoPath template.