InfoPath Dev

I have built an Infopath 2007 form with an input view and a printer/email friendly view. When the view gets sent out via "Send to Mail Recipent" it looks fine in outlook on desktop. For mobile users the formatting is terrible. My work has many iPhone and Windows Mobile 6.5 users, and the email has different formating for both. We now attach a PDF version as a work around, but we were hoping to resolve these formatting errors with the original email that is being sent.

Some of the formatting issues include:

iPhone 3 & 4

• Multiline text boxes do not display at all.

Windows Mobile

• Multiline text boxes do not display at all.
• Images do not display
• Text can be wrong size in random spots.

Any insights or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Aaron

Hi Aaron,

No real silver bullet here, but if you have MOSS 2007 with InfoPath Form Services you could configure it to display the form in the browser and send a link to your form in the email instead of the actual body. I realize that's an extra step, but that would certainly be a solution to your formatting grief (albeit requiring online access).

Otherwise, I recommend creating a special email view that is simpler and easy to display by using controls that display correctly in place of the ones causing you problems. Here I assume you are mainly trying to get the data to the reader and that they are viewing and not editing. For editing, you'll have to go with the previous option above. For example, you should be able to get the multi-line text boxes to display by just binding the data source node to a calculated value and displaying that instead (inside a section for example. Images should also display if you convert them to links which is a best practice anyway to reduce size of your XML payload. Not sure about the text size issue .... 

Happy trails,

Thanks Patrick for the quick reply. As far as my multiline (Rich Text) textbox not displaying, I created a regular text box and brought in the the original field. The text issues have continued, but its just on the winmo phones. As far as the image and displaying them by converting links, could you explain further? One issue I see is that most users will be using phones that are not connected to the network, so not sure that a link would work.

Thanks,

 Aaron

Aaron,

If you want mobile users to be able to open open and edit offline, query and submit online using InfoPath forms on mobile devices, you should look into Formotus. It's like a mobile InfoPath client but better because it includes custom controls for phone-specific tasks like signature capture, inserting photos, and GPS geo-tagging. It works offline and supports more InfoPath controls than a form in a mobile browser.

You won't need email because the forms are deployed, managed and undeployed over the air from an online management console.

Good luck!

 Glen