InfoPath Dev

I've posted a few questions related to an InfoPath form I have been working on.  InfoPath was initially chosen due to the perceived simplicity of the application (roughly 100 data fields, submitting to a SharePoint list).   The requirements began to change and more and more fields were added, basically 6 fields for each of the 100, so now the form has over 600 fields and as a result is incredibly slow.  It took one person 10 minutes to open the form, and it takes several minutes to submit the form as well.   I hate to scrap the whole thing, but the slowness is unacceptable.  

Has anyone had any experience converting an InfoPath to a C# web application?  I have spent a lot of time on it already and cannot afford to start over from scratch.

Thank you.

Is changing the backend of the form to be a database a viable option?  If so, is there a way to export the XML so it can be easily converted to a SQL server database?

Are 700 fields too many for InfoPath to handle?

Hi JakeG,

The data source isn't a performance issue - 700 fields is fine. More likely, it's your view. Performance is directly affected by hgow much stuff you display in your view. Hide stuff you don't need to show and the form will be faster.

You can map your XML data to a database. Qdabra Software - sponsor of this free forum - provides a generic Web Service that can be used to connect your XSN to SQL DB in less than 15 minutes. Go to Qdabra dot com and look for DBXL in the Products dropdown.

Happy trails!

Thanks, I will look into the DBXL product. 

So if 700 fields isn't the issue, do I just need to make a lot of views and show the user each one in sequence to get the data entered or do I need separate forms?

The form has two views, the first is around 100 questions with "yes" checkboxes.  The user checks boxes as needed and continues to the next view.  For EACH of the yes checkboxes, the user must now fill out a reason, select a contact person, and enter a date.  They must also select values from two dropdowns.  Should I do something differently to speed this up?

What I don't understand now is that it takes forever to even open the form, click "design this form", save any changes to the form, edit properties of any of the datasources, etc.

Is it the dropdowns?  I set up two XML files to be the sources for the dropdowns, and each xml file has five values in it. 

Any ideas?

 It sounds like the tremendous number of controls is the bottleneck.  If there are four controls for each question, that means about 400 controls in the view, and rendering that could be a performance problem.

 Like you mentioned, splitting up the questions into smaller sections (i.e. views) in one form would probably help a lot.

The first view had 100 checkboxes and 200 dropdowns.  I moved the 200 dropdowns to the second view.  The first view still takes a long time open (no improvement in speed at all).  Can there be something wrong behind the scenes?