InfoPath Dev

What I want my project to look like:

User: fills out Form A (InfoPath 2010) with several fields and some repeating tables.

Form A: Concats the repeating fields into a string separating the values by a ",".

User: Submits that form to a SharePoint (2010 Enterprise) form library. 

User: Fills out Form B with two distinguishing fields (Name and Year).

Form B: Fills in several fields and repeating tables extracted from the SharePoint form library.

 Everybody: Party Time.

 

Here's my problem. I have not been able to figure out how to populate the repeating tables in Form B with the Form A concatenated data that is pulled down from SharePoint. I have explored creating an XML file, using the string functions in InfoPath, creating workflows, ect. Unfortunately, I have either yet to understand what was presented to me or have yet to find the fitting solution.

 Some possibly important information:

1. I have multiple repeating tables with different amount of columns ranging up to 4. 

2. The string length of the concatenated data points is variable.

3. I am not awesome at programming but am willing to learn.

 

Any help would be useful. Thanks. 

I think the best way to do this would be to instead get the specific XML for Form A that the user wants based on the Name and Year selected in Form B, then to copy that XML data into Form B, using code (or you could try qRules). But you may be able to kludge something together w/out - do you have a promoted field for each column in your repeating table? Or are you munging up everything from a single table into a string? Any idea the max number of rows a user might insert into a table in Form A?

 Each column has a sting (not table). The rows could get up to 35-40.

 

I have been playing around with XML a bit but don't know how to get a SharePoint column (populated with a string) exported into a XML file. I also don't know how to import and XML file to populate a repeating table. 

 Yeah, I'm a little confused. At any rate, if the goal is to get repeating table data from an XML created using Form A into Form B, I'd use code (or qRules) for this. Basically, you need a data connection in Form B to a file in the library for Form A, and don't run that connection on load. Then you provide the user a way to indicate which file they want (selecting Name and Year) and you use code (or qRules) to update the data connection to the original XML file to point to the one the user wants. Query the data connection to return the XML data to the form. Then use code (or qRules) to copy the data from the returned XML file into the current form.

Here are some links that may be helpful:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.infopath.filequeryconnection.filelocation.aspx
http://stevemannspath.blogspot.com/2010/09/infopath-20072010-populate-repeating.html
http://www.bizsupportonline.net/infopath2007/copy-rows-from-sharepoint-list-to-main-data-source.htm