InfoPath Dev

Hi...I hope you can help please.

I have designed a form on Infopath for my staff to fill in details of their respective projects - I can easily publish this to my Sharepoint Forms library and choose the columns I want showing on the library from the form.

My problems lies with changes to my template. For example, if I need to add another field, or even add another option to a drop down field....when trying to publish again to my form library, it asks me to select the SP colums all over again and quite frankly there are just way to many.

Am I (re) publishing incorrectly or is this just the way it is?

The plan is to use all the information on the form library (via all the uploaded forms) which will form my projects dashboard view. Maybe even export to Excel.

 I also looked into transfering infopath forms to a SP list instead of a forms library using this article but got nowhere!!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162745(office.12).aspx

 I hope you are able to help

Regards

Hi,

If I understand this correctly, there are 2 ways to promote properties when you publish.  One is to promote while publishing to SharePoint.  The other is to define your property promition in InfoPath before you publish.  If you define this before you publish then it is much easier as you don't need to choose the fields everytime you publish.

In design mode click on Tools | Form Options | Property Promotion and add the fields there.  The form will remember this next time you publish and then you only need to add the new fields you add.

Make sense?

Ted

hi,

i think i may have solved the problem although i couldnt find a 'property promotion' option in 'form options' tab....

instead i am choosing them through the 'form library column' tab?

 and if i make changes to my form template i.e. add options to drop down, i no longer need to select the columns from fresh again....so thank you!

i had another question re bulleted text boxes...SP is only picking up text from bullet point 1 on my form. can you pls advise why this may be the case?

You have to choose the type of property promotion for a repeating field like that.  In your case you will want to choose "merge" if you want all to show in SharePoint (first is the default which means just the first value will be shown).

This is, however, a shortcoming in SharePoint.  Showing the data as "merged" makes it impossible to report on the data in an easy way.  SharePoint basically concactenates all the value into one column in SharePoint with a hidden LF (line feed) charachter seperating the merged values.

If your require relational reporting on this type of data (repeating data) then a tool like our DBXL can help

Ted

Hi Ted,

 thanks the merge is capturing the other bullets but as you mentioned not in the most asthetic way.

 can u please explain what this DBXL tool is and where i can purchase/obtain?

also - as mentioned i used tools > options > form lib columns and not property options as i didnt have this feature on my version of infopath. is this ok? it seems to be working fine...

Hi,

DBXL is a generic web service that lets you submit InfoPath XML data to SQL Server.  You define the mapping and the user works on their forms just like normal, there is just a submit to our webservice in there that allows the data to get into SQL.  It's easy to use and very cost effective compared to building your own custom solution to do this.  You can find more information including some demo videos about DBXL here: http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/DBXL.aspx

Pricing can be found here: http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/DBXL_Pricing.aspx we have a Beginner versions that starts at a very low price.

I would be happy to give you demo of the tool, you can send me a private message in the forums.

Ted