InfoPath Dev

When I attempt to use the Export to Excel wizard to export data from a repeating table, I find that the option "Form fields only (no tables or lists)" is the only one available (the other which should allow me to export my repeating table data is grayed out). I cannot figure out why the other option is not available and I really need to export my repeating table. Please help if you know why this might be happening!

Any thoughts on this one?

I've not used the feature very much... so I don't know... but I'll guess and ask: "Is your repeating table from a secondary data source?"

Greg Collins [InfoPath MVP]

Ah yes it is from a secondary data source. Could this be the reason I am unable to export? And if so, how do I go about exporting this data?

Again... I'm only guessing... I really don't have a real answer for you... I'm just hoping to help you stumble onto the solution.

I know secondary data sources are essentially second-class citizens in InfoPath right now. There's a lot of things grayed out for them that aren't for the main data source.

Patrick asks whether your table that you want to export is present in the view?

Greg Collins [InfoPath MVP]

You can write code to automate Excel,
Or, import the XML from within Excel,
Or, make the secondary data part of your main DOM!

Excel has some good XML support in 2003. You can specify a binding and load
the xml saved by InfoPath into Excel separately (from Excel). There are some
limitations - for example, Excel won't deal with rich text nodes nor will it
grok xsd:any, but outside of that, you should be fine importing from Excel

The InfoPath export to Excel option is rather limited. I was the dev lead on
the feature and I still understand it pretty well. We had great plans for it
but Excel ended up limiting some functionality that made it hard to export
everything. The transformation is also limited to single tables or all leaf
nodes, but I think you already figure that out.

My suggestion would be to create the "map" in Excel and then import the
InfoPath-generated XML. If this is too clunky, try changing the secondary
data to include in your main DOM (or import it into a separate InfoPath
solution that uses it as a main DOM). Finally, there is always the
do-it-yourself coding option.

Hope this helps,
Patrick

As always, the help is much appreciated. I think I will use code and Excel automation to accomplish the task.

Task completed.

The basic code I used to open and write to Excel from Infopath (using VBScript) is this:

Dim objExcel
Dim objNodeList
Dim objNode
Dim i
Dim rowindex

Set objExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
objExcel.workbooks.add
objExcel.visible = true
rowindex = 1

'Code below gets the data from the repeating table which is bound to a secondary data source

set objNodeList = XDocument.DataObjects("DataSourceName").DOM.getElementsByTagName("d:TableName")

'The code below is a loop which takes each row of the repeating table, extracts each column and writes each column to Excel

for i=0 to (objNodeList.length - 1)

objNode = objNodeList.Item(i).getAttribute("Attribute1")
objExcel.workbooks(1).worksheets(1).cells(rowindex,1) = objNode

objNode = objNodeList.Item(i).getAttribute("Attribute2")
objExcel.workbooks(1).worksheets(1).cells(rowindex,2) = objNode

objNode = objNodeList.Item(i).getAttribute("Attribute3")
objExcel.workbooks(1).worksheets(1).cells(rowindex,3) = objNode

rowindex = rowindex + 1

next

Very glad to hear you accomplished your task. Thanks for sharing!

Is ther some JScript equavilent for this?

Thanks for the tip. I have managed to export data to excel from a specific form stored on out Sharepoint Site by specifing a map. I'm looking for a way to create a map that will export data from the currently open form to Excel.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Glad to hear you got everything working! Thanks for sharing your solution with us!