InfoPath Dev

Hi all,

I have a problem and I don't know how to solve without coding.

This is what I want to do: Users could insert information about their providers. This information must be added to two lists of sharepoint, one for personal information and the other for phone numbers. For example, I need to add my provider James Jhonson and his personal phone number and his cell phone number. The words James and Jhonson would be in one list and the phone numbers with the word James would be as two rows in the other list. It's like two tables relationated in database.

My Infopath works well because I coded in VB.NET all the funcionality when send button is clicked, but I don't want to do in this way. I want to do it by Infopath ways (data sources, controls, etc).

PD: I'm using Infopath 2007.

Have you looked at this article yet?

Add SharePoint List Items with InfoPath
http://www.infopathdev.com/howto/tutorials/default.aspx?i=7bc880f391b84ea9b3b45c6fbecc07c6

Hi Greg,

Yes, I've seen this article yet and this is the article I used to insert information in Sharepoint, but the problem is how can I fill to sharepoint lists that one field of each one must have the same value and the user has to write it only once???

The structure is like two tables in a relational database that phones table has a foreing key of people table.

Thanks for the response!!!

Hi Jaime,

Good question! Have you considered using relational database like SQL? We have a SQL Database Accelerator Suite that is available for free evaluation that makes this mapping easy.

http://www.qdabra.com/proddetail.asp?prod=QDBXL1

Hi Patrick,

I cannot use any relational database in this project. The problem is that I have to emulate SharePoint lists as tables in a database.

I went to a begginer MOSS 2007 course and the instructor told us that Infopath 2007 can be as a relational database using XML technologies. I think that he meant that we can use XML as a database (we can make an schema and one xml file, and we can access data using XPath) and Infopath is the tool to get information. But it seemed to be that Infopath can define an XML structure and connect with Sharepoint lists to use these as relational tables in a database.

What is the correct idea about Infopath 2007 and Sharepoint???

Hi again,
That's a very interesting statement by the MOSS instructor. SharePoint is a great website collaboration tool but it isn't a good XML store because it is list based. Collections don't work well, so if you have any structure (repeating child nodes underneath a parent node, for example), the default display options in SharePoint won't work. You'll have to write code to shred them to separate lists. That is very doable, and it would be cool to implement, but why bother when SharePoint already includes SQL requirement as part of the install. Just use the same SQL database to define a proper relational database and shred to that without code. That's what I'd do.

Don't get me wrong. InfoPath and SharePoint are a great combination, but don't expect to use SharePoint as a relational database displaying the data in your XML. You could do it, but it's a lot of coding and probably not very scalable in terms of number of items. If you absolutely must use InfoPath and SharePoint to display relational data you can create separate dashboards forms in InfoPath that use xpath to extract and report on data in other InfoPath forms using either import or just SharePoint web methods.

Good luck!

Thanks for response.

I was thinking the same you wrote in the previous post, if SQL Server is requirement why can't we use it???

After try and try again several ways to do this with Infopath, I get the conclusion that it's impossible. The reason is how parameters of sharepoint web service are defined to add items to lists. But could we connect to other web service or pass parameters in a different way for adding items???