InfoPath Dev

I am new to this forum but have been working with InfoPath and MOSS for a while now. I was recently given a task to create a 'contract creator' using InfoPath and SharePoint. My company has several Agreements that our legal department uses and they are wanting me to build an in-house contract creator to build new contracts with ease rather than copy and pasting sections from word docs. I planned on using infopath to store all the data and/or SharePoint. I wanted to have each section of the contract put into individual sections in InfoPath then be able to use check box's to delegate which sections I want populated into a Word Doc. (I'm currently using Microsoft Office 2010 and sharepoint 2007 (migrating to 2010).

Is there a solution to this or any previously written threads that I can follow? Any information would help greatly. Thank you all in advance.

Hi Chase_H,

You should talk to tberch. He has a nice data-driven system that you could apply to contracts. We have done these many times before and it's totally doable but will require some relatively complex view work to make it data-driven. You'll have to use calculated values and pull data in from a secondary data source, ideally a database.

Send tberch an email and if he doesn't reply ping me.

Thank you for the response, I'll send him a message and see what happens. I don't mind the leg work.

I have a few conceptual ideas which I could make proof of concept for you if you don't have any luck. Sounds interesting and fun.

I spoke with you yesterday, but I thought Id post, just in case others are interested in the same thing.... My Data Driven Design with dynamic sections, is able to create every type of report that we do for our business in one form... QDABRA software manages replacing the text within the document, as well as manages the placement into SQL from my Infopath Form. It is a pretty complex solution with many moving parts... I would allocate a few months on this, because the learning curve is pretty steep.  I am pretty happy with the outcome, although I am not quite in production yet. The pain points I found were the limited capabilities of the Footers, the not able to extract page numbers from the Footers to populate the TOC, and just overall trying to create a solution that is pretty bleeding edge. Patrick and the team have been an amazing help on this project, and I highly recommend their products. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

I am very open to other ideas and paths to try. I do have a little while to "tinker" with this process and I don't my company is wanting to outsource this. I know they software products that are built specifically for this but an an in-house design is more of what they are after. If you have any further ideas please feel free to let me know. Thank you tberch for the responses yesterday and offering your assistance. At this time I'm really wanting to try completing this projoct, i know it'll be useful in the longrun.

I did some experimenting today with a proof of concept.
The outcome is two templates.

Template 1 is a simple 'rich content section creator' where you write up your paragraphs/sections whatever that you want to later select from to construct a document.

The sections can have 'variables' by surrounding a variable name in square brackets e.g. Hello [userName].
Once you have a few sections created, you save them out as an xml file.

Template 2 is a 'layout' configuration tool - it reads in the content from the saved xml files from Template 1.

You then can select any order or combination of the sections to display.
When a section is displayed with has 'variables' they are listed on the right so you can put in the value for that variable.

By manipulating the repeating group layout of the form you can construct a document from the sections.

At this stage I haven't figured out a generic delivery method for the forms from Template 1 to be accessible by Template 2.
As an interim measure, I've set that Template 2 must have the XML files from Template 1 added as secondary datasources.
This is actually quite useful, as it means copies of Template 2 can be republished and distributed with a set of 'sections' built in - allowing multiple base 'Documents styles'.

I've attached a sample Template 2 with some provided 'sections'.
To use it, save the attachment to your computer, right-click and select Design, then use Preview.

Again - this is just a mock up of a possible method for constructing the kind of solution you described
- as I was building it I thought of many similar options, like using Microsoft Word - this might prove better down the track do to Word's more advanced formatting and printing options.

I used jScript and Infopath object model extensively - but I believe the security should only need to be Domain for the template to work in a production environment.

Caveat: I had this working quite nicely on my machine - but I'm sure there is scope for errors. If you're so inclined, post them and I'll try to fix them.

I am out of the office till Monday but I will begin implementing one of these concepts. I ultimately need this to to transfer to word for to use its built in red lining capabilities but being able to create the document from preloaded data is the first task. Thank you for responding, I'm sure I'll be in contact with you next week regarding this. I unfortunately only have my iPad this weekend with no access to InfoPath.