InfoPath Dev

Hello, we all bitten off more than we can chew based on what we've heard or read and i would really appreciate it if someone who's been creating complex real world business apps using INFOPATH can tell me if i should be able to handle some complex master detail or parent child entry forms using INFOPATH please? And i'm basing this skitishness on just having completed a 2007 Sharepoint project by the skin of my teeth, ie i had to create workflow pointers just to create a parent child list relationship and thank goodness it worked, but that experience has me wanting to really get the "real" story on tool capabilities before volunteering for the next one!

 So thanks very much for a very conservative estimation on this quesion!

bk

Hi there -

In my mind, so much depends on what you want to do with your data after you've captured it in your form. If you will only be looking at it in your form again, parent/child is pretty easy to handle. If you need to actually report on it, aggregate it, etc. you may want to use your forms to collect your data, but submit to SQL (we make an awesome web service for this) or make sure your repeating line items are individually written out to a SharePoint list (qRules can do this - another product from the company I work for). You could also create a database bound form using the built in capabilities.

Hope that helps at least a bit!

 Thanks Hilary,

it is so important to see the forest for huge number of  trees 

Thanks for your insights on my question Hilary and the actual project will mainly be sort of a trouble management project with alot of user interaction, ie where an Issue is created and folks can review the Issue, add, modify, delete comments, add documents to the Issue and also add another table related item called a Decision which has it's own set of comments, document handling and user crud interactions, but linked to the Issue form, so not alot of aggregation or reporting, but alot of user interactions, i guess sort of like a very complex help desk trouble shooting scheduling system, and both main table structures, Issue and Decision, would have their own parent child relationships? So Hilary, in your efforts at where you work there at QDabra or elsewhere, have you maybe seen where they used Infopath successfully for this kind of intensive user interactions? thanks again Hilary!