InfoPath Dev

Hello Everyone, I am New to this forum and fairly new to Infopath and finding it to be an awesome, powerful and fairly untapped resource not used enough in businesses today.

So here is my problem. I have created SharePoint site with Office 365, E3 sku, for clients small business. I have tried to provide them with the ability to share and access all relevant data by all staff on all devices.I created a Site called Contacts with sub-sites for categories and then lists in those sub-sites for the sub categories.

Here some example urls

https://servername.sharepoint.com/contacts/clients/Lists/Clients/AllItems.aspx
https://servername.sharepoint.com/contacts/suppliers/Lists/Manufacture/AllItems.aspx

This allowed me to create individual contact folders in outlook for them to access data and easily find contact information on any device, including iPhone (using SharePlus)

So onto the problem- I am trying to create a Journal list on the parent Contacts Site, where staff can enter information regarding any tasked carried out against any contact, very much like the journal function in outlook. This will be displayed against a contact so you can view email discussions, notes and phone calls made buy any staff member. So I created a form witch has several drop-downs:

• Category - listing Contacts Sub-Site
• Sub-Category - Listing sub-site lists 
• Contact - listing the columns in the select list

This last one is the problem area, trying to dynamical pick a list to request data from! I have started down the path of creating a REST connection like this

https://servername.sharepoint.com/contacts/clients/_vti_bin/ListData.svc

so what I need to do is dynamically change the URL, editing the Clients string with the Category and then appending /ListName from the Sub-Category to return the list of names from what I have seen I think this is possible but not sure what needs to be done.

Any and all advice on if this can be done, how it can be done or a better way to do it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help and Happy Holidays

Rob Wilde

Hi Rob,

Microsoft just released some training content that we created earlier this year regarding Office 365. One of Hilary's modules focuses on REST. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/IP2010ExtData.  Lots of great resources to help you learn REST syntax.

The easiest thing to do is to just use the Sesame Data Browser. It's a silverlight app that helps you create REST query strings. Just point it at your Ofice 365 list and use the UI to create filters. It's quite powerful but was a little buggy last time I checked. Who cares though since it's just a tool to help you create query strings. :)

Best of luck,

 

 

 Hi Patrick and thanks for responding to my post.

 I have watched this training series and was very helpful. I spoke with Hilary on another post on Saturday and she assisted and got me on the right track.

The Sesame Data Browser seams like an awesome tool but I can get it connect to my Offce 365 teamsite and I have the same problem when I publish my form to the web. I get to the drop that contains the rest query and it will freeze.

The form works fine when I my machine but freezes on the actual site it is querying, does not make sense to me at all.  Any idead on what I might be missing.

 Thanks again for your help

 Rob Wilde

 As mentioned before still have the issue when trying to utilise the form in the browser, the REST request fails but seems to work fine if I run localy or in sharepoint workspace localy. Not to big of an issue but would like to know why that is.

The big problem is that the form updates the list but the list has the ID's from the list queries and not the Display Name. How do I get the names and not the ID's into the list online?

Thanks

Probably authentication is the issue. We did this extensively in the May timeframe and haven't connected Sesame to O365 as much since then. There are issues with normal SharePoint sites that have https or anonymous access turned on, but I don't know if either of those issues matters for O365. With InfoPath Designer, you need to have IE9 installed or else it won't even connect to the REST services.