InfoPath Dev

Hey.

 Im new here, and fairly new with Infopath, using Infopath 2007.

I doing a template for a company as part of my education. This template is split up into sections(assessing the product, internal analysis, external analysis .....), these are also made as sections in the Infopath document I´ve made so far. The employees at the company should be able to fill in some text, attach files and select among oppotunities in a drop-drow menu. All these things i thing have pretty much under control. The problem is, that i would like to let the employers click on a buttom(or something similar) which and thereby save a section (that i have specified on forehand) on theire harddrive. It could be saved as a word document, a pdf or what ever. When the employee has attached files, these files should also be saved in the same place on the harddrive as the section it is attached to.

The purpose of it all is, for example that the document acts as a template for filling out specification about a product, to send out to suppliers. Therefor only a section of the whole template should be saved, as not all the data should be send to the suppliers.

Is it possible to do that?

Hi Kim,

You can definitely do this with a Full Trust form and some code to save the separate XML fragment from the section. Qdabra's qRules supports saving XML fragments without the need to write code but only to a locally installed database (DBXL). You could do it all locally without having to do Full Trust or code but that would require qRules + DBXL. To write the code isn't hard, and would probably take 2-3 hours. The big issue is that this isn't a best practice for the following reasons:

• Full Trust - this is a security issue and creates a form that is harder for your users to use. Bottom line: more cost and potential risk of spoofing.
• XML fragments - why not just save the entire XML or create separate forms that map to the individual sections. The problem with fragments are that there is no validation and they let you get away with bad forms design. I.e. create a big form that has "everything and the kitchen sink" in it. You're better off having multiple InfoPath form templates or just saving the entire thing. Trust me. We've been down that road many many times.

So, I recommend reevaluating your requirements. You can save to SharePoint or a Web Service (e.g. DBXL) without Full Trust. You can save XML fragments with qRules too, but we don't recommend that.

Hope this helps in some small way,