InfoPath Dev

I'm trying to work through some performance issues--long load times--with my form. It's got a lot of data connections, but to fairly small Access DB tables (all in the same DB). I may be able to clean some of these up, and possibly clean up some nested layouts and DDLs, but I'm wondering if some of my problems might be solved by just embedding the form in a web page Content Editor control (or something similar).

Is this possible? Can I have my users navigate to a web page and open it up and fill out the form right there?

Hi Stuart,

Unfortunately this is not very easy to do with InfoPath. With InfoPath 2007 there is going to be a lot of support for presenting forms both as a rich client (with InfoPath installed) or as a web page (no InfoPath required), but with 2003 you're really stuck making everyone install InfoPath.

There are a couple solutions out there that can convert an XSN into a web page, but I don't think this will give you the results you would like.

Thanks. At least I won't waste my time on it, then.

I still have troublesome performance issues to resolve. I've got a lot of DDLs in a repeating table, and each DDL has its own data connection. I know this is inefficient, but I don't see a way around it. I can't load all the tables from the Access DB in one data connection because I have to have each DDL's table be the Parent table in order to populate them correctly, and List boxes aren't as friendly to users, because I have to keep them to one line and make them use tiny scrollbars.

Any thoughts? Should I repost this in some Performance thread?

What kind of performance issues are you seeing? Does the screen flicker or maybe the drop-down take a long time to actually drop down?

It just takes a long time for the form to load. 15-30 seconds on LAN, 3-5 minutes across Citrix at field offices. Some of it is network issues, and the network traffic may be reduced if I can find a way to reduce the number of data connections it has to access across the network. Some of it is probably html conversion on loadup.

There aren't actually any problems once the form loads up, that I'm aware of.

Thanks for helping, by the way!

Hm, well this sounds like you won't really be able to tweak it from within InfoPath, except from what you said by reducing the number of data connections. Three to five minutes sounds like an awefully long time for a form to load, if you can't cut down on the number of data connections making pages for the data might be a good idea. This is where instead of displaying 1000 rows be default you only display 100 and provide buttons that allow the user to page forward and backward through all the rows.