InfoPath Dev

After clicking the link that says "Click here to sign this section" it takes a total of 6 clicks and windows to finally sign the form. Is there anyway to cut down on this?

This is not possible without code.

With code we can cut down but the form needs full trust

Hi Mahitha,

Could you perhaps elaborate on how you can cut down on the clicks using code?

I am designing a browser-enabled InfoPath 2007 form (with full trust).

Also, is there a way to force the user to sign a certain section of the form? Currently, the user can submit the form without signing the required section.

Thanks in advance.

Hi IVL and welcome to our forum!
I thought digital signatures were not supported in the Form Server rendered InfoPath forms. Are you using some other mechanism? For client-side InfoPath forms, we add code that programmatically signs the form using the Sign method in the InfoPath programming model. It requires two clicks. One click to route the form and another to verify the signature info.

Hi Patrick,

If you have a browser-enabled form and go to Form Options > Digital Signatures, you'll see that the option to sign the entire form is not supported by Forms Services, but signing parts of the form is.

As a side note, you'll also see that the option to prompt the user to sign the form before submission, if not signed, is under the 'sign entire form' option, which is disabled. That is why I asked how to do this programmatically in my previous post.

Anyway, what I did is I added the root element of the schema as the part to be signed (I fail to see how this is not the equivalent of signing the entire form?). I then wrapped most of the controls with a section control which can be digitally signed.

The "Click here to sign this section" link gets rendered in the browser once published. It seems that Forms Services supports this through the use of an ActiveX control which the user must install. Out of curiosity, I checked whether this would work in Firefox, but got an alert saying that this browser is not supported. Back to IE, as soon as I saw the pre-release disclaimer for the ActiveX control, I decided not to install it since we have MOSS 2007 RTM on another server and this test server has B2TR installed. I'd rather install the final version of the ActiveX control and thus have not tested whether signing parts of the form actually works in the browser yet, but it should.

Thanks for the information on the Sign method, I'll do some research tomorrow and see if I can use it to achieve my goal.

Hi - it's me again.

It seems that for browser-enabled forms, the classes for signing forms are hidden from the developer.

I checked this by removing browser compatibility from the form. Only then was the Signing event, SignEventArgs, Signature class and the Sign method available to me in VSTA. When I re-enabled browser compatibility, these classes were missing, so my code wouldn't compile.

The users of the form will just have to live with having to click multiple times to sign it.

Hi IVL,
Thanks for the edification. I remember now that the ActiveX is supported but there's a lot of stuff that isn't as you have found out. Another idea would be to use a middleware app like our Database Accelerator that keeps a history of all forms and supports fine-grained permissioning based on fields in the form. However, that isn't quite digisig. What do you need digisig for?

Hi Patrick,

Apologies for the late reply - I haven't worked on those InfoPath forms for a while because of other commitments.

The reason we wanted to use digital signatures is to ensure that these forms (used for our internal processes) do not get tampered with along the way (integrity) and to ensure that the employee who filled out a form was indeed the originator of the form (authenticity).

It is not a train smash that I cannot reduce the number of clicks required to sign the browser form - it just would have been a nice feature.

I guess the only real issue is to be able to force the user to sign the form - something which I still have not figured out how to do.

I will post if / when I find anything, but it will probably be after the new year.

Best wishes for the holidays.

Hi IVL,
Happy Holidays to you too. Good luck with the train wreck. :)