InfoPath Dev

Hi, I am constructing a form that reads a SharePoint list of data containing existing deployed content type forms and their form titles.  My intent is to use the data to create a SharePoint web part listing available forms for users, with the ability to click a link that opens each form in the browser.  This is to give the user a "one stop shop" for form access rather than publishing links on pages everywhere or requiring them to navigate to a specific library.

Here's my issue.  My URL's to each form are rather long, and I need the form to direct the user to a "closing" web page that basically says "Thank you for your form submission" with a close button.  I have this constructed.  When I add the extension for the redirect, "?DefaultItemOpen=1&Source=https://<<server>>/Pages/SubmittedRedirect.aspx", the string is too long for the list item.  I need to concatenate the existing URL entry in the table with this extension, however I'm loading the list contents into a repeating table via a secondary data source from the SP list using qRules CopyTable.  It seems hyperlinks and hyperlink controls aren't exactly friendly when it comes to using formulas.  If I use a rule based on the URL data element in the repeating table, I just get the first entry in the table.

Any ideas?  Help would be much appreciated.

 Hi Tom,

Would it be possible for you to create a separate InfoPath Web Part page for each template, and then use URLs to those pages instead of the really long URLs associated with the form libraries themselves?

Another idea: if you can modify the content type templates, how about adding a Closing view to each one, enable the Submit button to switch to this view (after submitting the form data of course), and then include "Thank you for your form submission" and a Close button on that new view? That way you don't have to worry about a redirect extension on your URL.

 Let me know if either of these suggestions helps.

Thanks for the suggestions Jennifer.

Perhaps I need to make the scenario a bit more clear.  We use an exclusive browser environment, primarily because not all users have Office 2010, and some of those customers don't have InfoPath Filler installed.  Also, there's a great number of Office 2007 installs in our organization, and my experience has been that when a 2010 filler form is attempted on a workstation that has 2007, it doesn't just open the browser version, it throws an error.

Also, our primary intranet presence is SP2007, but our forms environment is SP2010 because of the added functionality it allows.  When a browser form is closed, by default the browser displays a "The form has been closed" page.  I'd like to give the users an opportunity to close the browser with a single click instead of two actions. 

Also, forms are launched from the 2007 environment with hyperlinks.  We are migrating our entire environment to SP2013 in the next 6 months to a year, but I need some way to handle our situation in the meantime.

Wouldn't a different view for the close action just put the user back on the form closed page?  Also, I'm not quite sure about what you mean by different web parts for each template.  These are the individual forms currently used in production, and my intent is to create a centralized "menu" that can be utilized as a launching point instead of hyperlinks spread across many web pages.

Hope this makes a bit more sense.

 Hi Tom, I understand now: you are linking to existing forms, and that's where the crazy long URL is sort of unavoidable. Concatenation is tricky, as you've discovered, so what I like to do first is see if I can shorten the form URLs.

 May I ask exactly what one of your form URLs looks like? As you may know, there are a bunch of parameters tagged onto the end of those URLs, and not all of them are always needed.

 For example, if your URL looks like the long ugly thing below, you can actually remove all of the parts in bold and still open the form:

http://au.formsboard.com/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=/ContentTypes/ERContentType.xsn?XmlLocation=/Expense%20Report/ExpenseReportFormName.xml&ClientInstalled=true&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fau%2Eformsboard%2Ecom%2FExpense%2520Report%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx&DefaultItemOpen=1

You can also replace &DefaultItemOpen=1 with &OpenIn=browser since you say these are all browser forms.

 Ok, supposing the shortened URL is still too long for your list item, you should be able to set the concatenated field using a simple rule on the repeating group itself. I did a quick test of this, as you can see in the screenshots below. I used CopyTable on a ShP list to copy the data into MyGroup, then created a rule on MyGroup setting the Concat field (which contains the concatenated URL) to the correct concatenated link, which was even clickable after I used a hyperlink control (set to read-only) for the Concat field.  You can see a screenshot of the rule and the form behavior below:

The concatenate on the repeating table works great for what I need.  Repeating tables seem to respond differently to rules than I expected.  It's kind of against what one would think happens, but if it works, I'm good with it.

Thanks so much for the tip. 

 Oh yeah, don't get me started on the craziness of repeating tables!  :-)

 One more thing: make sure that the number of columns in your list matches the number of columns in your repeating table, or else CopyTable won't work, so you may need to create a blank "Concat" column in your list and just hide it from view.

Yep, already discovered that quirk.  Thanks.