InfoPath Dev

Hello!

(I would have waited during less than half an hour to ask my first question ;)

So, is the use of servers absolutely necessary? Indeed I'm quasi obliged to work in a local way. Can you confirm that it's possible?? Thanks.

Hi again,
You shouldn't be downloading massive amounts of data to your client because of the time it takes. Using a middle-tier Web service will reduce the size of data crossing the wire if you pass a filter parameter to it. What are your requirements?

Ok, i'm going to explain in depth my issue:
I'm working on Tablet PCs (not really higly-capable) and I'm obliged to have on each tablet PC a database containing lots of items (Internet connection is not always possible despite 3G cards...), and a form using this database.
I just want to optimize all of this!!

Hope this allows you to better understand my problem!?!

What is the database? Access or SQL?

Sorry for this lack of precision...:) It's a database Access

Having a dropdown with several thousand items is a bad practice. You can either break it up into cascading dropdowns or provide some kind of search functionality. In either case, you will need to query the database using a string. We provide the EnumDB Web service free as part of the Free Dev edition of our Database Accelerator for SQL that provides this quary capability using a filter parameter (i.e. no code is required). To do the same thing in Access will require code either on the client or server.

Actually I don't want to display all the items in the dropdown, and to do it I've already used filters (research field) to display only the good ones but it seems that the whole table is loaded anyway...

I think what you are trying to do is a common scenario, mobile, off-line users, on tablet PC's. You would maybe get slightly better performance using SQL 2005 express but the main problem is how much data you are loading. I would be surprised that they need all of the data everytime, my guess is they are trying to find the data they need. You should be using a primary data connection, do you use linked tables? Sometimes it may work better to have things in multiple forms and have them linked together. Ideally you provide them the minimum information on load and then let them query your main connection, which should be pretty efficient. If you want to send me email with your exact situation I may be able to help you with some ideas on the solution.