InfoPath Dev

I am finding more and more uses for Infopath - I have almost abandoned Excel/Word/Access competely. I have developed a form for an application which solves so many of the difficulties with the other Office apps, but with one very large problem - calculation speed.

The form contains schedules along with costs. The heirarchy is three levels deep - Section/Item/Buildup. I have a number of expression boxes and calculated fields to add materials, labour, subcontractors etc and then calculate total cost and price.

When the file gets up to 400 rows (file size 200k) it can take over five seconds just to add or edit a value. One option was to remove all expressions and self-updating text boxes and then have a 'Recalc' button. I tried this using jscript and then using a rule - both took over two minutes to run through the whole document.

The second idea is to switch self-updating on and off with code, except I can see no way to do this.

The third thought is to submit the whole document to a web service for calculation then reload it back into the form. This may be a stroke of genius or completely mad!

What does anyone else think?

Clive Glover

Check out this thread -http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1314

There is a link to MS dicussing InfoPath Performance Tips.

Thanks. I have seen this already but there seems to be nothing related to calculation speeds. I don't have any conditional formatting or anything like that. Fortunately most of my forms are of a sensible size, but I am going to have a go at the webservice idea just for the fun of it!

Rgds

The likely issue is that the calcs are happening quickly but the view is updating slowly. These kinds of situations are hard to debug without seeing the solution.

400 rows in an InfoPath form is at the far end of the spectrum for InfoPath's capability. I hate to have to say this given your high praise of InfoPath, but Excel is better suited to so much calculated data.

Thanks for your comment - it feels like I am pushing the envelope a bit here but IP works so well for me because I can mix text (construction schedules) with costs and have a variety of different outputs. IP massively improves internal data consistency and has much nicer output. Academic surveys suggest that 90-100% of spreadsheets have errors which I find completely believable (the world will end not through plague or pestilence but a circular cell reference)!