InfoPath Dev

Hi

I have a form with 2 views, the first view has the submit option, so once the user has completed this section of the form and submits it, it kicks off a workflow for approvals. When the required approvals have been granted, the orignal user then gets access to the second view. My problem here is that depending on certain selections, hidden sections will appear with madatory fields. I orignally could not make them "cannot be blank" as this stops the first view from being submitted, so I have built in validations to highlight the required fields. As the form has already been submitted to a SharePoint Forms Library, the user can ignore these fields and save the form again. Is there any way at this stage, that I can force them to complete the form before saving and/or printing?

Many thanks

Bill

hi Bill McGuire,

I would suggest you just put a submit button on the second view that just submits the form to the document library and does not trigger any workflow

Yes, Bill, this should be no problem.  First of all, I suggest using my method of auto-generating filenames for your form submissions.  View that here:

InfoPath – Auto-Generating Filenames

Using this concept, you get unique filenames that the user does not type in.  You may already be doing something like this.  If so, then you have a field like the one in my blog: strFilename.  If you have a field like this, then it is the trigger point for your data validation logic.  Basically, instead of using "Cannot be blank" to make fields required, you put data validation on them that says "If strFilename is not blank and requiredfield is blank."  If you have a lot of fields, this will be cumbersome, but it is very easy nonetheless. 

It's not cumbersome at all if you use the Infopath 2010 client, because you can copy and paste rules.  I am doing this already for all of my 2007 and 2010 forms using the Tech Preview bits.

Hi Qazi Anis

Many thanks for your assistance, apologise for late reply.

Cheers
Bill

Hi Clayton

Thank you for replying, and apologise also for not getting back sooner.
I did as you suggested and beleive that this will do the trick.

I think the form needs to be re-created as too many people have worked on it now.
Many thanks again.

Cheers
Bill