InfoPath Dev

Hello all,

I'm a DBA and not an infopath developer by any means, but I need your help with telling me if what I want to do is doable or not.

We have a form library that stores a form with information for each database we host for our clients. Each database has a form with information such as:

Database Owner
Application Supported
Backup Location
Security Requirements
And so on...

I was asked to put the form together back a couple months back so we could inventory our databases.

Now I'm being asked to transfer these records from the infopath forms/libray into a database table so we can report from.

I have no clue if I can connect to these forms and pull data from them, do you guys know?

I would like to loop through this library and pull the data from each form into a SQL table, is this doable?

Let me know if you guys can help.

Best regards,
-Igor Santos

Hi Igor,

Yeah, it's a piece of cake to do this. Here are the steps:

1. Download the free trial of Qdabra's DBXL (for one time mapping, you don't need to purchase the product)
2. Install it on a computer that has IIS and has access to your DB
3. Add your XSN to the Qdabra DBXL DAT tool
4. Use DAT to create a mapping between your XML and Database tables (lots of docs on how to do this)
5. Import all of your XML files to DAT, or if you have >100, use Doc Deployer tool to do so
6. Verify the documents have mapped to your DB
7. Uninstall DBXL

Voila!  I'm guessing it would take me 20 minutes + time to define the mapping (can range from 5 mins to 2 hours depending on complexity of schema) to do this for you.

Good luck!

Is this the only way of doing this?
Would be possible to query forms without installing any 3rd party tools?

Hi IgorBlackBelt,

Well, with code anything is possible. I was just providing a no code, low cost method (free). That's how I would do it and I'm guessing it would take <1 hour.

If you write code, you'll need to use SQL Client Permissions, which means full trust form and the headache of writing the code. We can do that for you if you want, or we could help with the first method. Check out Qdabra's Support page if you want hands-on assistance.

To investigate the coding approach, I'd search for SQL Query Parameters and I'm sure you will find some info in the thousands of threads on this site.

We're here to help ya,

I downloaded and installed the tool on a VM with IIS and it didn't work.

During the install, the application pops up a "Qdabra Database Accelerator v2.4" window that, I think, is asking me to input some parameters used to configure the tool.

The window has 5 tabs: Site, Log On, Document Security, Active Directory Service, SQL Server.

The site tab doesn't allow me to change the port for the web site, can I change this somewhere, manually?

Hi Igor,

I am going to contact you to help you with this install issue.

Ted