InfoPath Dev

All,

Potentially I have to use an InfoPath form to "look" into an SQL db. Assuming I can get my form to connect to the SQL db (never done it before).

As I understand it, the basic data will be a list of client names

The first problem is it's potentially to look at 40,000 client names. - This is somewhat of a non starter I think for an infopath form. Even acascading drop downlist i.e. A, B, C. Select C and you'll see a very large list of C names.

How would you approach it?

I'm wondering if I can do some sort of wild card search box. i.e in a 'search' box, type wilk*, press Go. It would return wilk1,wilk2 etc. Perhaps hopefully a much sorter list than a basic alphabetical cascading list. Then I can select a name that way. 

Ideally I'd like to keep it in an infopath form as if I find a client name, I'm going to have to populate other fields in my form with various client information.

Otherwise I'll have to use a SP search option which hopefully I can then use to create/prepopulate an infopath form.

Thanks

W

You're right that if you return that much unfiltered data InfoPath will exhibit horrible performance.

I'm not sure if there's a way, out of the box, to search SQL using wildcards, but here are some links to check out.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomizationprevious/thread/725fe3af-7fdf-479a-96ff-d97d750f3a10

http://blogs.technet.com/b/elenat/archive/2008/05/13/designing-an-infopath-form-that-can-store-data-in-a-database-part2.aspx

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomizationprevious/thread/5aa4519c-b8e0-4a7c-85b4-09f7e1d0747a

Another option is a web service that allows you to pass in some parameters (wilk*), filter on the server and return to the InfoPath form only the information that matches your search. If wilk* is not enough to narrow down the results, then you could require a minimum of 5 characters, wilki* (or more, depends on the data set).

Our generic web service is called QueryDB and you can learn more here.

Good luck!