InfoPath Dev

Hi, I have an infopath 2013 form which has several radio buttons. Since we have no dev site, i dont want to publish the form and prevent the users from submitting the form. I want to know if these red dotted lines on the radio button are ok to be showing up for data validation and will it still let you submit the form? Sorry i understand it sounds like a simple question but any help is appreciated. Sumanth

Hi - the red highlighting indicates a validation issue. Submit data connections will fail if there are validation errors, so no, I think the form won't submit with a validation error. Is the field bound to the radios set to Cannot be blank? Changing that should remove the validation - or it could be the field has a validation rule on it. Feel free to attach your template to a reply under the Options if you need help.

Hilary - Yes there is a validation rule but all the items are part of one field called Type_of_Separation and we require them to be mandatory. I guess i am not sure how to make all these fields mandatory but a user should be able to select Voluntary column first and then if they change their mind - select Involuntary Options and vice versa. All the while being able to let them know that they need to make a selection. Hope this helps. Thanks, Sumanth

Right now, the validation rule is "Type_of_Separation" is present - change that to "is blank" instead of "is present".

Great and did just that. So I was doing the opposite to what was needed. Setting the form to say required when the radio button was selected and not the other way around. Thanks again for your help! Sumanth

Hi - The attached form from the previous reply had the auto-fill options set from one of the 4 data connections on the form. It worked great offline. You type in a employee's name and the form fills out up to the Manager's name. After I published the form to our intranet, I am getting this error message attached. The functionality is lost. Any suggestions? Thanks, Sumanth

Is this using on prem SharePoint? Or online? If on prem, you could change that setting for InfoPath Forms Services. Or, you could set up your employee data so that you can leverage query fields to get back just the data you need, which is what I'd recommend. However, I see in your rules you are using contains to get the information for the employee from your secondary data source - we can only use equivalence in the built in InfoPath query fields.

This is using online SharePoint. We have around 1500 employees in the employee file through the data connection but the ID's of the items starts at 2500 and goes to 5200. Our ETL keeps the list current so that we don't have to maintain the employee list ourselves since our company goes through a lot of seasonal employees and the HR controls a master file. Would this feature then not work in this case? Sorry if i am being repetitive. I am not quite sure what you mean by "built in infopath query fields" . What would be the alternative to "contains"?

When you create a connection to a SharePoint list in InfoPath 2010 and later, the data connection contains query fields. You can set the query field to the employee ID and then run the query to return just that employee. Query fields only use equivalence for comparison. So - you'd need to change the Employee Location List to not query when the form is opened (that is a checkbox in the data connection wizard) and then, when the user enters the employee name (which seems to be bound to a field named "Employee ID" in your form's main data source) you would set the Employee ID query field in the Employee Location List connection's query fields and execute the query. However - your current logic is using contains in XPath, so I'm not sure that this is workable for you - because this requires an exact match.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I did remove some of the columns from my data connection and that fixed the issue for now. The auto-fill works but if the data increases in the future, i might have to use your steps.