InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I posted on the MS Technet forum a while ago and didn't get much of an answer from there so I'm hoping this community (long time listener, first time caller :) ) might be able to shed some light on my problem.

Using InfoPath 2010 on a tablet/slate device that has both pen & touch input running Windows 7 Pro.  It's product page is at http://www.motioncomputing.com.au/products/tablet_pc_J35.asp. 
I have also reproduced the issue on a Windows 7 Ultimate laptop (no touch or pen) with an Acer T230H 23in touchscreen attached.

This page (http://clubhouse.microsoft.com/public/post/659fa6d8-2d13-446e-ab80-a5a23bd4c9e9) includes a chart indicating the various Windows 7 touch gestures available. 
We've found, in a very reproducable way on our devices, that if you accidentally perform a two-finger tap gesture anywhere in InfoPath that it zooms the
display.  I've never seen InfoPath zoom before (I thought it was impossible actually).  This same gesture works correctly in Internet Explorer and some other apps.

The problem is that to unzoom you would normally repeat the gesture (this is the way it works in IE / other apps).  However in InfoPath 2010 it zooms again, and again, and again until something like a textbox takes up the entire 1280x800 screen! 
We can't find a way to either

• Disable this gesture; or
  
• Unzoom when InfoPath does zoom; or
  
• At least prevent accidental two finger taps  (having your palm on the screen whilst tapping with your hand can be enough to trigger it on the tablet. The Acer touchscreen is a bit better in this regard)

Any ideas?  The only information I could find about Office 2010 and touch gestures was in the Excel 2010 blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/excel/archive/2010/02/18/windows-touch-excel-2010.aspx) and it stated that Excel adoes not do anything with this gesture (which I've confirmed to be the case).  In fact, the blog states that applications need to specifically handle the two-finger tap gesture themselves, suggesting that InfoPath goes out of its way to handle it but does so incorrectly.

The system is up to date with all Windows 7 & Office 2010 patches deployed via Windows Update.  We haven't gone out of our way to apply hotfixes
for either Office or Windows although I've looked at the Office 2010 hotfixes lists and couldn't see anything for InfoPath anyway.  It occurs in all forms of
InfoPath - Designer, Preview Mode (launched from Designer) and also in InfoPath Filler.

I suspect that the problem could be that InfoPath uses a bit of Internet Explorer under the covers to do its rendering.  I've tried on machines with Internet Explorer v9 beta and v8 - the fault occurs in both cases.

Any ideas or assistance would be very much appreciated.  Thank you!

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I'm afraid I have no insight into the touch capabilities, but you are correct about the link between IP and IE -- InfoPath leverages Internet Explorer's rendering engine (more info here and here). I am going to see if we can get a link to this post to someone on the InfoPath team, perhaps they'll have some information.

Hi Hilary, 

Thanks very much for your reply.  InfoPath and tablets, whilst a nice combination, doesn't seem to get much of a mention around the web yet.  If someone from the InfoPath team could help that would be excellent!

Cheers, Ian

I would look to see if there is a way to turn off gestures for IE. If so, that might solve your problem since, as Hilary states, InfoPath is just using IE to render the views. This is why Auto-Complete works for InfoPath - it's just using the history stored in IE.

We have sent this question off to our contacts at Microsoft. Hopefully they will respond before too long.

Thanks Patrick.  I did investigate your earlier comment of disabling gestures in IE.  The only way I could see, and it was an ugly hack, was to use API hooks to intercept the Windows messages received by IE and then drop those messages...  Whilst technically fun to do I wouldn't want to push that out to production.  I did some API hooking a few years ago (faking a computer name to satisfy licensing requirement for software by a vendor that had gone out of business) and it wasn't fun although it did work :)

Hopefully someone at Microsoft can reproduce the issue and, if not provide a fix, at least acknowledge it and schedule a fix soon.

Is there any update on this?  I am seeing the zoom get stuck on InfoPath 2007 7 on win7.  Is this a documented MS bug?

 

Thanks!

Hi,

It's reassuring that someone else has the same issue.  It's also interesting, although not completely surprising, that IP 2007 has the same issue.

 I've recently got in touch with Microsoft support (not an easy thing to do even if you're a Microsoft partner - a LOT of time spent on the phone and explaining via email, etc)

Anyway, the support person initially replied that InfoPath didn't support multi-touch.  As we know, of course it doesn't, but I asked for clarification about whether that means

• InfoPath is not supported on a system that has multi-touch capabilities and may do weird things like zoom in sporadically; or
• InfoPath just doesn't respond to multi-touch events.  This is similar to how Notepad behaves - it works in a multi-touch environment and is blissfully unaware of multi-touch gestures that need to be specifically coded for, such as the two-finger tap.

I pointed out that I think they intend the 2nd point and that if it was the 1st point it was ridiculous because InfoPath on a tablet (which are increasing doing both pen and touch rather than pen only) is a common scenario pushed by Microsoft for several years.

 The issue has now been filed as both a bug and a design change request.  I'm told similar bugs had been filed in the past (although "similar" could mean anything from "why can't I zoom in InfoPath" to "why won't infoPath let me use two fingers to draw ink at the same time") and they were all marked as "won't fix".

That was last week and it may be a couple of weeks before I hear more information.

In the meantime there is a workaround.  If you visit "Pen and Touch" in control panel there's a "Touch" tab in there.  There's a tickbox second from the top that talks about disabling support for multi-touch gestures (I haven't got my touch monitor plugged in at the moment so I'm writing from memory).  If you do that then any multi-finger gestures are disabled system wide.  InfoPath no longer has the fault of course, but other nice tablet-like things such as pinch to zoom and the two-finger tap in Internet Explorer also don't work.  Single finger panning still works though.

I'd encourage you to also file this as a bug with Microsoft.  We ended up not being charged for the bug report as it was a bug in the product.  Maybe with enough people reporting the issue it might get fixed in a coming Office 2007/2010 update.  Once I finally made contact with a person in support she was very helpful and replied to my emails within a couple of hours each time - it's just reaching support in the first place is the tricky bit :)

Let me know if the workaround works for you or if you find a better workaround.

 For others who find this thread, I ended up posting a video to SkyDrive to help explain the issue.  Apologies for the terrible quality and use of Movie Maker :)  http://cid-1564c2e9ca39de26.photos.live.com/self.aspx/InfoPath%202010%20Bug/My%20Movie.wmv 

Thanks, this helped me.

I know this is a REALLY old thread, but I wanted to post two bits of information in case people land on this thread via Bing/Google...

We eventually got a fix from Microsoft KB2536597 - it's at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2536597/en-us

That's the good news.  The bad news is that InfoPath 2013 has the exact same bug - I've just been experiencing it on two different Windows 8 tablets.  Tomorrow we're going to file another bug report with Microsoft.  At least this time we'll be able to reference the old emails and that KB article instead of having to prove and explain the issue.

 

Thank you so much for updating - I love it when people come back and do this so that others will actually find a solution instead of just another question! :)

We're seeing the bug in InfoPath 2013 on Windows 8 - any updates?

 No update yet I'm afraid.  The last contact from MS said it was being escalated in the product development team.  Maybe the "blue" wave of updates will have something?  I'd love to be able to pan an InfoPath form naturally with a finger rather than using the scrollbars! :)

Thanks, yes - hopefully a patch is coming.

 this was functionality I was ready to sell to the executives UNTIL I realized that touch didn't work on a windows 8 tablet.  it seems elementary that you would be able to scroll with your fingers like every other app...but no.

does the patch fix this issue?  I would love to have a tablet in portrait mode available with pen input so that our client can scroll the InfoPath form like an iPad and then sign the form with a pen input device.

but as it stands, I cant tell the execs this is ready for prime time.