InfoPath Dev

OK. I swear I have looked through these forums, MSDN and the web endlessly but I cannot find the relevant pieces to properly place these things together. I've even asked the question on the MS forums but it went unanswered for days (since deleted) so I am trying here. I know my way around SP but I not so much Infopath and I am not a dev but I'll go where the solution lies.

Scenario: User has list in SP that tracks rejected materials. Every so often, the user needs to create a credit memo to send to the supplier showing the rejected items and calculates the cost of the order and totals up the complete credit. Today, its a copy and pasted into an Excel form. The user would like to just select the items to request credit for and hit a magic button to generate the email.

Solution: I thought this would be easy to do in IP2010 but that is proving not the case and perhaps this isn't even the right solution. My plan was (is?) to use an IP2010 form that would suck in the list data and filter for the items that haven't been credited. I have done this using a secondary data connection, and dragging that connection onto the form as a repeating table. I have the flter set to only show the rows where a credit number doesn't exist.

I have also managed to create a check box in the repeating table and binding that to a empty text column in the SP list. This was the only way that I could get a checkbox to work independently.

Where I am stuck is what to do now. Can I select the rows from the repeating table and have an uber button that generates and email? Should make the uber button submit the form to a form library and then have a workflow gereate the email? Can I even go from the form to an email (I can't attach the InfoPath form as I can't assume the external recipients have IP2010).

My secondary data source is: /dfs:myFields/dfs:dataFields/d:SharePointListItem_RW. 

My target table in the main data source is: /my:myFields/my:group1/my:copyGroup_rTbl 

Please advise….I have attached a file with screenshots of the SP list and the current form I am using for a POC.

Hi there - you were smart to repurpose a SharePoint field for your checkbox - in your repeating table, you need for the fields to all belong to the repeating node the table is bound to in order for them to work right.

If you want to copy multiple instances of your repeating secondary data source into your main data source - that's going to require code. But these items are all for the same supplier? So you'd want to send a single email from the form that covered the credits for all the items?

I mean, you could use a double eval formula to get all the item names into a semi-colon delimited list, for example, and a sum formula to generate the total. That way your email would include the list of items and the sum of the credit - would that be adequate?

Thanks for the quick reply. 

Yes, I want to copy multiple rows of data from the repeating secondary data into the main data source.  When the repeating table is populated, it may have rows of data pertaining to different suppliers.  The user would then select a subset of data for one supplier, roll that up in another table that does some extended cost calculations and fire that off in an email.  So if you look at the screenshot of the SP list, the repeating table would have 3 rows in it: 1 row for supplier3 and 2 rows for supplier2 (I am filtering the incoming data on whether the Item filter column is blank so Supplier 1 never shows up in the repeating table).  The user could select supplier 3 and send an email or, one or both rows for supplier2 and send an email.

The actual email and SP list in production would contain a PO number, unit cost, possible discount information amongst other stuff so I am not sure a delimited list would suffice unless I re-queried the SP list to get all items for the matching ID and then dumped it into the main data source.

I would probably need some condition around whether or not the box is checked such that if the box is checked, the query runs and if it is not checked, if the matching ID is in the main data source, delete that row.  Am I making this too complicated?  It seems so straightforward in my head (a problem to begin with)!

Well, XPath filters make selecting the nodes with the boxes checked a pretty straight-forward exercise:

/dfs:myFields/dfs:dataFields/d:SharePointListItem_RW[d:Checkboxfield = 'true']

For example - with, of course, d:Checkboxfield replaced with your actual field XPath. You've mentioned qRules is not an option for you, so you'll need to write code - you can find samples online pretty easily that should get you started.

Would using qrules make this a whole lot easier?

Well, you wouldn't have to write custom code to copy your repeating secondary data into your repeating main data source. You could use qRules commands for that - either Insert & SetValue if the schemas don't match, or CopyTable if they do. Here's a link to a video I did on this - it will give you an idea on how the product works. Your form, if it is going to be a browser form, will have to be admin approved or sandboxed either way - qRules is code, so you'd need to admin approve / sandbox for browser - same as if you wrote the code itself. Custom code you write for your form is likely not going to be re-usable, and will cover just this form. qRules can be used in all your templates and has a large range of commands so you don't have to write code to get great InfoPath functionality.