InfoPath Dev

All,

I'd really appreciate your input.

I currently have an InfoPath form (browser) which is used as a 'time sheet'.

It has several fields: Employee Name, Office, Date and Time, Manager, Work Details.

The problem is that very quickly my SP library is reaching it's List view threshold.

The Managers want to keep historical date for certainly several years.

The library has several views : All, "Most recent form per employee". An employee can add several forms per day.

I'm wondering how I can keep the historical data, but keeping the number of items in the library down to a minimum.  I'm trying to stay away from retention policies etc.

Can you 'copy' the information in one form and add it to another form, which collates all details per employee in say a table for example?  Then ideally delete the original form.

I could then create a new (repeating table?) 'table form' per Employee - Year/Month etc.

Thanks

W

Hi W and thanks for posting,

Microsoft has prescriptive guidance about the library and list view thresholds (~5000) but it's only strictly enforced if you use item level permissions. In other words, you can have a form library that has 50,000 items so long as you don't have item-level permissions.

OK, so let's say you are going to hit the limit because you are using item level permissions...

The easiest thing to do would be to create a separate form library for old timesheets. You can call this an Archive library for last year or maybe last quarter, or whatever.

You can add a link to that library on the main form library page and have people go their to view data summaries for that archive.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you cannot run view reports across all timesheets.

Another option is to just create the ultimate scalable solution and submit your data to a SQL database and use a data view on the SharePoint list view page to view the data. This will scale to milions of items and you can aggregate in one place. It will require configuring BCS or better yet using a third party web service (such as Qdabra's DBXL), but it's relatively straightforward.

We can help you with second option if you are interested. Just send us email.

Good luck!

Thanks for the information, much appreciated.


A

Thanks for the information, much appreciated.


W