InfoPath Dev

Hello,

I'm new to the File Attachment control so any help with this post would be greatly appreciated. I have a browser-enabled form that queries from and submits data to a SQL database. On one of my views on my form, I'd like to be able to attach multiple documents and have them save to the SQL database so that they can be pulled up with the rest of the data when each client is queried. I'm using VB for the form code for my query and submit operations. Does anyone know how to do this or point me to a site that can help me? Thanks

Hi g21cincy,

I suppose you could write code to do this, and I have heard that SQL has some support for images (maybe in more recent versions), but we don't recommend adding code to your InfoPath form because it increases your IT maintenance cost. Most people end up with hundreds of form templates and maintaining code throughout each becomes a nightmare.

We use Web Services to submit XML to databases and save the XML separately. If the XML contains a base64 encoding for the file or image attachment, those are roundtripped fine as XML. Sometimes we save files to Document Libraries and replace them with links - this reduces size of the XML and also provides out-of-band editing. Make sure you use the "file://" protocol when you do this so that you can open the file from InfoPath and edit (http:// links will result in read-only opens). 

To convert file attachments or images to links, check out the free trial download of qRules. It uses a rule to save images to a SharePoint site. If you don't have a SharePoint site, you can store the files to a DAV Web Server but you need to configure it to be open to writes.

Sorry for not being so helpful,