InfoPath Dev

Hi - i'm new to Infopath so apologies for my ignorance.

I have created my first functioning Infopath form and am now working on developing a workflow for it. Unfortunately we I don't have a full enabled version of Sharepoint to use so I am using the e-mail submit function for the workflow.

Obviously this is easy to do where the receipient is pre defined or will be from a small subset of individuals. However there is a stage in the process where the form could be sent to anyone in the company (1200 staff). The problem with this is that I can't work out a way of adding an 'addressbook' to the form so that users can select the e-mail they want. I can have a text input box which the user can either add the name (which is verified against our outlook addressbook at the submit stage) or the full address however neither is ideal due to the potential for spelling mistakes and duplicate names within the company.

Given that the form does validate names and e-mail address against the addressbook I assume that it should be possible to introduce a 'picker' within the form itself? Could someone let me know either way?

I am using Infopath 2007 - Windows XP.

Hi BlueBen,

InfoPath 2007 ships with a people picker control. Have you tried using that? It should be based on Outlook's Global Address List (GAL) and not require SharePoint.

If the out-of-box people picker doesn't work for you (because you need to select multiple people, etc.), you may want to look at Qdabra's Zero-ActiveX Contact Selector. This has support for searching for users using partial search strings and adding multiple users. The new contact selector (to be unveiled in the next week or so) comes with Active Directory and qRules, both of which can help you accelerate your forms' development in many other ways, and the price is quite inexpensive. Free trial of DBXL+qRules can be downloaded to get it working out-of-box. No code required.

Let us know if we can help in any way,

Hi,

Thanks for your input. After posting I actually googled a bit more and was able to add the people picker control using the below guide.

 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/infopath/archive/2007/02/28/using-the-contact-selector-control.aspx

This works ok, however as you correctly preempted, I really need it to select multiple individuals. It does allow you to do that within the picker however when I then link the display name to the 'TO' field of the e-mail submit data connection it only picks up the first person.

Thank you for the suggested software - however obviously for issues of simplicity and ease of use I'd rather be able to just use the standard InfoPath features.

As a work around could I create 2 people pickers within the same form and have one link to 'To' and the other 'CC'?

Ok, so further googling has helped me add 2 people pickers, one linking to TO and the other CC.

Is there no way that I can add multiple selections to the TO field though? Seeing as the picker does allow multiple selections I'm hoping that there is some clever way of doing it.

Check this out:

http://alecpojidaev.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/infopath-codeless-programming-walkthrough/