InfoPath Dev

I have a simple development request form (Infopath 2010) that contains a few dates (today) and a review date, three text boxes (Previous Development, Development Review and Next Development) plus a few other rating options, user ID and Manager These are completed by trainees (users) and added to a Sharepoint 2010 list, producing a list with many entries, several from each of the managers involved. I have set up a data connection and can extract a field from an entry, but I want the LAST entry that a specific manager submitted for a specific user (using username() ) for the user, and manager field. How do I find the last of several such entries? I can pick the manager and the user from previously submitted forms, but ideally I want to select the development activities from the LAST form of a particular manager and user. I cannot rely on the review date being before the actual review takes place, nor within a fixed time period i.e. normally the review should be conducted with one month of the start date, and before the review date agreed on the form. Any thoughts or advice? Leslie

Could you give us screenshots of your list data source to give us some idea of its layout? Is the data connection sorted such that later submitted items appear later in the data connection. Would you be amenable to having it sorted so that later items occur FIRST? That may be easier to work with.

sorry - struggling to see how to upload the screenshot - hope this helps??

the item name will be something like below. Each manager (Leslie, Simon, etc.) the month (probably full date) and employeeID

The form, if I could upload it, has an agreed Development text field where the manager and employee agree a simple development goal. The Reviewed and Prompt on the first form, for each manager/employee combination is blank.

When the manager opens the second form for an employee the Prompt is filled from the previous form, hence Excel Basic for Oliver's second form, Project Management for Andrea, etc. A manager may have several employees which will eventually be filtered for reporting purposes, and this I can do already.

The list can be ordered in any format, I was assuming they would be in name order, as shown below, although I can see that the Name_Date_Employee may become Name_Employee_Date to ewase the grouping, this can be done easily.

I can connect to the Sharepoint list and use the employee and manager to identify the correct forms (filter), but cannot ensure I have selected the LAST form, which will have the latest date, and be last in the list for any particular manager/employee combination.

Today() will always be after the Date field, but not always before the Reviewed date field, so I cannot use the date as a filter.

Name	Manager	Employee	Date	Review	Development	Prompt	Reviewed
Julie_Jan_Pe	Julie	Peter	14-Jan	23-Feb	Finance for non-Finance
Julie_Feb_Pe	Julie	Peter	19-Feb	15-Mar	Excel Basic	Finance for non-Finance	Not Useful
Leslie_Jan_Mi	Leslie	Michael	10-Jan	12-Feb	Excel Basic
Leslie_Feb_Mi	Leslie	Michael	13-Feb	03-Mar	Excel Intermediate	Excel Basic	Not useful
Leslie_Mar_Mi	Leslie	Michael	01-Mar	04-Apr	PowerPivot	Excel Intermediate	Useful
Leslie_Jan_Ol	Leslie	Oliver	02-Jan	01-Feb	Excel Basic
Leslie_Feb_ol	Leslie	Oliver	03-Feb	10-Mar	Powerpoint	Excel Basic	useful
Leslie_Mar_ol	Leslie	Oliver	20-Mar	03-Apr	Drawing	Powerpoint	Excellent
Mary_Jan_Ba	Mary	Barry	21-Jan	01-Mar	Influencing Skills
Mary_Feb_Ba	Mary	Barry	16-Feb	10-Mar	Negotiation	Influencing Skills	Excellent
Mary_Mar_Ba	Mary	Barry	03-Mar	12-Apr	Conflict handling	Negotiation	Excellent
Simon_Jan_An	Simon	Andrea	02-Jan	10-Feb	Project Man
Simon_Feb_An	Simon	Andrea	26-Mar	03-Apr	Word	Project Man	Excellent
formula for filename	Text	Text	Date	Date	Text	Development from previous	Text

 Hello again,

If you've already figured out how to identify which rows belong to the employee/manager combination you want, I think you just need to modify your data connection to sort descending on whichever column you are using to determine the order (probably either Date or ID). Then when you use a filtered path to get the value, something like:

 SharePointListItem_RW[Manager = Manager and Name = username()]/Prompt

that should retrieve the value you want, the first match, since the values are sorted in reverse.

Note that you don't have to change the ordering of your list to do this, just the sorting in the data connection.