InfoPath Dev

Hi all!

I am currently looking into the viability of Infopath as a means of replacing our existing (Unison) system. I have had quite a lot of success making a form to invoice customers and store the invoice information into an Access database. I have it so that when an account number is entered, the invoicing address is retrieved from a secondary data source of client's account details. I did this using the rules facility with filtering. As it stands I also have a product database as a secondary data source and am having problems when it comes to retrieving a product description and list price from this database. I have a repeating table to contain all the items on the invoice and would like to have it so that when an itemCode object is entered, the corresponding fields are populated from the secondary data source. I have managed to get this to work for the first row in the table but when more rows are added, the ruling seems to work only with mixed success. Has anyone had any similar problems and if so did they manage to solve it? Any help offered would be much appreciated!
Also, is using an Access database loaded onto our shared server that all our branches have access to a worthwhile solution? Or will it be more trouble than it is worth?

Thanks,
Dan Allason

Hi Dan,
I'm not sure if I can follow you. Do you want to get the data belonging to the the itemCode in the same form or are you running a query first?
What do you mean with "mixed success"?

Hi Dan and welcome to our forum,

I could be wrong but this sounds like the often requested xpath trickery found in the following HowTo:http://www.infopathdev.com/howto/tips/default.aspx?i=2d9c464bbf4146ae91bf66395dca34ad . If not, let me know. I'm not sure this is just a reference issue, so please respond if I am jumping to conclusions.

For the second question, it depends on how much access you have (no pun intended!). If you need greater scalability, you should be able to migrate your data and form to use SQL without a huge amount of work.

Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev

Thanks for your replies!
What I am hoping to achieve is a situation where, when invoicing a customer, the user needs only enter the item code and quantity for each item and then for infopath to complete the rest of the row (description, net price, tax etc) by retrieving the associated information from a product database.

When I say I have had "mixed success" I mean that I have it working for the first one or two rows but when I add a third or more I run into problems. My suspicion is that when filtering the product database for the user entered itemCode = Item_Code (in the database) it is not doing a fresh search for the itemCode associated with that row...

Patrick - sorry but that link you gave doesnt return anything!

I have many more questions (as you might imagine!) and am hoping to make good use of this forum - so far I have only had the Office online help to guide me. Should there have been a decent user guide with Infopath? It was just put on my desk by our IT department!

Cheers again,
Dan

Hi Dan,

I updated the link not to append the period and it works now.

Searching the forum and the InfoPath SDK are good resources. We also have many HowTo documents and of course, we have four people from the InfoPath team (who actually worked on the product). So, we have a ton of expertise to help respond to your questions..

Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev