InfoPath Dev

Hello! This is my first post here, so please be gentle. I’m still new to Infopath and Sharepoint, so I’m sure my blatant my ignorance will show quickly. Hopefully I’ll be able to articulate what I’m after well enough that you can understand my needs. I work for a State office and I’m trying to convert several of our approval forms from FileNet to Infopath/SharePoint. Drawing up the forms was quite easy – but some of the field interactions are proving more difficult. Compounding some of my problems is the fact that my office doesn’t have the Enterprise version of SharePoint and I’ve received no official training on any of the programs.The documents and designs I’ve come up with have been basically developed through trial and error.  --FIRST ISSUE: Filtering--- I have several fields that need to provide cascading choices – what you choose in the first field, filters your pick list in the second field. 

• Field 1 = Bureaus (group)
• Field 2 = Administrators (individual) 

Since I have no less than 4 forms that will use the same identical dropdown configuration, I wanted to connect it to a SharePoint list rather than house the choices locally on the form. Things seemed fine at first and then I slammed into the ‘cannot filter web-enabled forms’ error. The one solution I saw required building a custom service in VisualBasic – truthfully, I’ve never ever seen the program, let alone tried to develop something in it.Is there a way around this that uses SharePoint Designer or another less technical program? --SECOND ISSUE: Conditional Workflow Direction--- Based on the choice in Field 1 – I need my workflow to direct the form to a particular Approver. If the default Approver is not able to process the document within 2 days, the form and attachments will need to forward to a backup Approver.  My thought is this: 

• Field 1 = Bureaus
• Field 1a = Backup (hidden)
• Field 2 = Administrators 

Have Field 1 drive not only the filters for Field 2, but also auto-write to a hidden Field 1a, that the Workflow would use as reference for approval backup. Is there a more elegant way of doing this? -------------- Thank you for reading, I really hope someone can help me.

 

Hi, welcome:

As to question 1 -- I don't know of a way around the limitations of filtering in browser forms. I'm sorry. Here is an article on the InfoPath Team Blog for writing a web service to return filtered results. If you don't want to write a web service, we sell a very complete one here. If you aren't a programmer and this kind of filtering is essential, I think you'd find it to be of great help.

As far as your proposed design for the workflow, I often have fields in my main data structure that I don't put on the form. You can use a rule on Field 1, so that when a user selects a Bureau, the Backup field is populated....Perhaps you have that information in the same data source as your list of Bureaus? 

Thanks!

I actually found an auto-fill example that seems to work pretty well for what I was trying to do.

Thank you for your help!

~R