InfoPath Dev

 Hi Everyone,

 I would like to ask, is it possible to create an infopath form, then published to a SharePoint environment, and it is browser enabled, to contain managed code that is able to open an uploaded excel file, check the contents, and process the data inside that excel file, and use the data to populate fields in the infopath form?

Does anyone know if this is possible?

 What I'm trying to do is create an InfoPath 2010 form that would live in a SharePoint (Enterprise) server and have it update an Excel File, and upon the UPDATE have a Excel VBA load the data to SQL Server. I've been able to get Excel to do this last part fine, I just need an instance of a InfoPath form, on SharePoint, which populates the Excel file.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Hi Dan,

Well, most people use either a) a Web Service tied to SQL, or b) a SharePoint list tied to SQL via BCS. This is the first I have heard of the VBA approach. Why not just map your InfoPath form to the SharePoint list and use BCS to write it to SQL? The problem with Excel is that it's client side (the VBA won't run on the server so someone has to open the Excel spreadsheet and run it). In addition, you need SQL Client permissions, so it's not a best practice from a security angle.

Of course, you could also just download our free trial Web service (DBXL) - in terms of time, that's your lowest cost option, and the licenses start at a very low price point, i.e. it's inexpensive. Key thing is it will save you countless hours since it will work on all XML forms without special customization.

Patrick,

Thank you for the information and tips. I'm new to SharePoint with InfoPath development and was trying to work within code that I'm very familiar with. But I've read enough now to know that what I thought would be the "easy way" to achieve the results just aren't viable.

I'm looking into the Qdabra DBXL product that you suggested now, I'm wondering if we only have one SharePoint Site and one SQL Server that we would need to be populated, then would we only need the one license option? Also, with this tool does it migrate the SharePoint data collected via the InfoPath forms immediatly to SQL Server?

 Appreciate your insight!!!

Yes, the Beginner license is likely all you need.

To answer your second question, yes, it includes many tools including the Document Migation tool which can be used to move all existing documents from SQL into DBXL. DBXL then saves them to your SQL database and can also be configured to map the XMLs back to SharePoint.

Let me know if you have any architectural questions.