InfoPath Dev

Hello all:

 I'm still very new to InfoPath.  I'm exploring the use of InfoPath in our organization.  I've learned there are a lot of ways to publish forms, a lot of ways to store/access data, and a lot of nifty controls to use on a form itself.  I've also learned that the choice of publishing mechanism limits the choice of data storage and control options.  I've been learning it mostly by trial-and-error, with the help of a few brief summaries of the options that I've found.

Here are the requirements:

1. The forms need to be available through an internal web (we have a wiki, could also implement SharePoint).
2. The forms need to be able to support multiple lists within a form.
3. The data needs to be available to use outside of the forms.

Here are the options I've explored:

1. Storing the forms outside of SharePoint.  Fails at requirement #1 above (can't publish to a wiki).
2. Storing the forms in a SharePoint List.  Fails at requirement #2 above (can't have a one-to-many relationship in a SharePoint List - I've tried splitting these out into separate forms and it makes for a complex user experience).
3. Storing the forms in a SharePoint Library.  Fails at requirement #3 above (no SQL-like access to data in forms libraries).

Am I missing something here?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/guidance!

You've run into some InfoPath/SharePoint limitations in your scenario. If you want to write to SharePoint lists from one form, you can take a look at qRules. For writing to SQL you can take a look at DBXL. Information on both is available at http://www.qdabra.com. There may be some solutions that involve writing code or creating your own web service as well.

Hi ErnestoM:

Thanks so much for your response.  DBXL looks interesting - especially if we could set it up to run periodically.  Is it often used in that way?

 I'm afraid I don't understand the question. What would need to run periodically?

We'd like to run the DBXL Web Services to periodically to refresh an SQL table with the latest data from a set of infopath forms stored in a SharePoint library.  Then we can easily use the data in a variety of ways.

I see. DBXL actually sends the data to SQL on every submit, so you wouldn't need to worry about getting the latest data, since the databases are constantly updated.

Aha!  I didn't realize that it did that - what a fine thing DBXL is!  Thanks!