InfoPath Dev

 Ok, I got that to work.  I will have to change quite a few more to see if it speeds anything up.  Thanks for the help.

 Is there a faster way to move multiple fields to a group rather than one at a time?  I tried highlight multiple fields but it will only let me pick one @ a time.  Sort of a slow process with as many fields that I have.

 Do you think Infopath is the right tool for what I am doing?  It seems really cumbersome at this point.  I haven't been able to move many of my existing calcs into groups because it takes forever to move them one at a time.  Seems like there should be a better way.  This was originally an excel spreadsheet, and the creator said it would crash the spreadsheet and or have too many errors.  I tried to get my development team to work on it, but they were all too busy, so I tried with Infopath, but I'm starting to think that was a bad idea. 

I think InfoPath is an ok tool for what you're doing, but in my honest opinion, you're not going about it the way InfoPath was intended to be used.  XML (and InfoPath is just a visual representation of XML) is great for grouping similar sets of data together, and those tables in your form should really be repeating tables, not flat tables.  Your data source would be quite simple:

myFields
     lobbyServices
          rooms (repeating)
               roomName
               quantity
               unitArea
               totalArea
               comments
     diagnosticDepartment
          rooms (repeating)
               roomName
               quantity
               unitArea
               totalArea
               comments

And so on.  That's how I would suggest you structure it if you were just starting out, but now that you've done all this work, I'm not really sure what to tell you :-/

Thanks, I don't mind scrubbing what I have done so far, it's only about 2 weeks worth of work.  A great learning experience I would say.  I think the repeating table is the right choice here, and I was going in that direction when I first started but I couldn't figure out how to populate it with the data that you see in my form.  I will research that further and hopefully clean up this little mess of mine.  Thanks again for the help. 

Another quick question under the rooms (repeating) you have:

roomName
quantity
unitArea
totalArea
comments

are those groups or fields? 

They are fields, and they are non-repeating.  The group that contains them repeats.

Now to make the rooms group appear under more than one supergroup this is what you would do (in the case of my example):

1. Create the lobbyServices group
2. Add the rooms group to lobbyServices (check the box to make it repeating)
3. Add roomName, quantity, etc.to the rooms group
4. Create the diagnosticDepartment group under myFields
5. Right-click the rooms group and select Reference...
6. In the dialog that pops up, click diagnosticDepartment and click OK - the rooms group and all its children are added to diagnosticDepartment.  Easy as pie!
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for all the other categories you have

Now when it comes time to populate it with all the room names and areas so that they are built into the form, there is a bit of a trick to that, so once you are done with the initial steps, please attach the template to this thread and I will use it to demonstrate what to do from there.

Alright, I created the groups that I need thus far.  That was fairly easy.  I have attached the file.  We have the excel sheet that we can turn into an MS Access Database if we need to?  Or is there another way to populate the room names and areas? 

If your room names and areas change often, you might find it easier to use a database like Access or SQL Express (which is the free version of SQL from Microsoft -- I like it better than Access). If they are pretty static, you can either type in manually the entries for a drop down list control, or create xml files that you can use as a secondary data source. Here's a link to some Office Online info about populating drop down list boxes.

The names are static, the only variables would be in the quantities, unit areas and comments.  It is also nice that it's repeating since there maybe some additional rooms added.  I've got someone working on converting the excel into an access database now, but I haven't been successful in populating the form with the data yet.  I will try the link you sent to see. 

Is the only way to populate in a drop down or can it be a textbox?

You can autopopulate a text box, too. For example, if you had a field called 'Area' and a data source that related areas to quantities, you could set a rule on your areas field to fill the Quantities field based on the selected area. While this blog post refers to a drop down list selection, the same logic would work with other controls.

Wow.  You have more categories than I remembered.  Unfortunately, the simplest way to populate it without using code is to enter the values by hand.  I'll show you the steps for how to do that here, but if it's just too many rooms we can look at other options.

Before that, I noticed that there is a rule on the room name field to re-query SP-administration every time the field is modified.  Any reason that is there?  It doesn't seem to do anything and it will really slow down your form.

Here is how to manually populate those values:

1. Open the form in preview mode
2. Begin adding values to the repeating table.  Enter whichever values you want built-in to the form (I'm guessing that would be mainly room name and unit area)
3. When you've added what you want, use File->Save to save what you have to disk.  Save it with the name template.xml.
4. Close preview mode and return to design mode.  From the file menu of design mode, choose Save As Source Files, and choose a destination directory
5. Close all instances of InfoPath where the form template is open.
6. In Windows Explorer, browse to the directory where you saved the source files, and where you saved the template.xml file in step 3.
7. Copy the file you created in step 3 into the directory where you saved the source files.  There should already be a file named template.xml there, so click Yes to overwrite it.
8. Right-click the file called manifest.xsf and select Design.  At this point you can re-save the template as an XSN if you like.
9. Preview the form.  The fields you entered should be there, already built in to the form when the form is opened.

The saving grace here is that since you are building these fields into the form, the effect is cumulative. That is, you don't have to enter everything at once.  You can enter some rows, replace the template.xml, re-open the form template, repeat, etc.  Once you have the form the way you like it, you can set the repeating tables' properties so users can't add or delete rows.

 Please give that a try and let me know if it's doable.

I had put that rule in because I wanted to test a data connection to an external Access Database that i couldn't get to work.  hopeing to populate those static text boxes with the data from the database.  it never really works for some reason.  maybe i'm not doing it the right way.

 other than that yes, my original file that i uploaded the other day was a trimmed down version because the site wouldn't let me upload anything larger than 128kb.  i had to take out some views. 

 I will try your next suggestion of adding the text manually since I can't seem to get it to automatically fill it in.  I may choose one of my larger forms since that's the one that usually slows it down.  I took off the data connection you mentioned so it won't slow things up.  :)

Yes, it would be nice if you could populate static text from a secondary data source just like that, but I'm afraid that there's no way to copy repeating data without code.  Anyway, good luck with the method I described, and let me know if we should start exploring other options.

Now that I'm getting deeper into this newer version of my form I have a couple of questions.  Say I have an area with multiple room types like in my surgery group.  Can I do a repeating section with my repeating table inside of it, feel it out and save it as the template?