InfoPath Dev

Dear InfoPath Dev gurus,

 I am modifying the meeting notes InfoPath template to make it more interactive and to pull pre-populated information in to hopefully make it faster to fill out. For taking attendance, I want to create a custom sharepoint list with meeting names and semi-colon delimited lists of invitees, then have my form query that list, parse the list of invitees and use that list to populate a repeating table where my meeting organizers can then record attendance.I found the delimited rule in qRules but that seems to do the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve - take rows of data and create a delimited list. I want to take a delimited list and populate rows of data. I saw that FilterOwssvr has a delimited switch, but I'm not sure whether it can be used to accomplish what I need. I consulted the PDF documentation but didn't find any detail on using the delimited switch. Any help you can give would be terrific. Thanks!

Kevin

Ok, suppose your main data source was structured like this:

myFields

  L  attendees

       L  attendee (repeating)

              L name (string)

              L attended (boolean)

And let's call the field where the semicolon delimited names are "nameList"

When you want to populate the list, you send this command to qRules:

concat("Insert /parent=/my:myFields/my:attendees /child=my:attendee /count=', string-length(nameList) - string-length(translate(nameList, ';', '')) + 1)

This string-length(nameList) - string-length(translate(nameList, ';', '')) + 1 part here is a trick to count the number of semicolon-separated segments in the field value.

Then on the attendee field, you add the following rules:

Rule1 - condition: nameList contains ;

Set name to substring-before(nameList, ';')

Set nameList to substring-after(nameList, ';')

Rule 2 - condition: nameList does not contain ;

Set name to nameList

As rows are added to the table, rule 1 will slowly chip away at nameList, removing the first part, and leaving the remaining part.  Then when there is only one remaining part and the final row is added, rule 2 kicks in to assign the remainder to the name field.

Could you give that a try?

 Thanks for this Jimmy. I got the insert command to work but have to run to a few meetings -  when I get back I will try the rest. I really appreciate the help!

 Hi, Jimmy. I tried this and here is what I got:

 The insert command results in 1 row being added regardless of the length of the namesList string and regardless of the number of semicolons present.  This leads me to think that the count provided by  string-length(translate(@Invitees, ";", ",")) is the length of the entire string, not the count of number of occurrences of the delimiter. So the  string-length(@Invitees) - string-length(translate(@Invitees, ";", ",")) + 1) section results in a value of 1, regardless of input.

The rules on the attendee node work well - if I change '1' in the function above to '6' i get six distinct names.

Any other ideas how I might accomplish this?

Thanks,

Kevin

You have a comma between the last pair of quotes, but there shouldn't be anything between them.

 Thanks, Jimmy. I fixed that and I modified the second rule that checks to see if the NameList is missing the delimiter to add a condition to check to see if the Name field is empty. Without that the second rule was populating the last two rows instead of only the last row.

Thanks again - I think my form is now ready to be published!

Kevin