InfoPath Dev

My company has developed an app which the customer uses to populate my various Infopath forms. I would like to be able to take several completed forms (all based on different templates) and combine them into 1 document. I don't want to merge forms based on the same template and I don't want to mix the data from 1 form in among the data of another form. I simply want to add 1 completed form to the end of another form. Is this possible, and if so, how do I go about doing this? Thanks for your help.

Hi SlCuster,

Yes, first look at the Status Report sample - it does this kind of aggregation.

For your report, you'll want to use A->B merge which is what we call it when you merge a form with a different schema into your form. Each individual form may not repeat at the root node. But, schema B will, or may differ in some other way.

You can either write code to do the import or an XSL. Visual Studio 2005 has a much better support for writing XSL and we recommend that. For the code sample, take a look at Jim Cantwell's HowTo on passing parameters. It's related.

Good luck and let us know if we can sell you a few hours of dev time. :)

Thanks for your help, Patrick. I'll look into it and we may take you up on the offer of buying some development time from you.

In our situation, for an A > B merge, the A document would be a constant - a cover page. However, the B document may be derived from any of hundreds of disssimilar .xsn files. We won't know the schema of document B until run-time when we want to merge and print the documents.

To further confuse the issue, there may be a C, D ,E and F doc that we need to merge in as well.

Given this, do you still think The A > B merge is a possible solution?

Just to give you a better idea of what we are doing: We are using InfoPath backwards - as a reporting vehicle. We have a VB.NET 2005 program which fills xml data-sources from SQL 2005. The xml data-sources are empty copies of the InfoPath form you get when you fill out an InfoPath form and save it. After our program fills this template with data, it calls InfoPath to open or print it.

Hi Steve.Custer and welcome to our forum!
If you don't know the schema, you can use Merge Forms. I recommend code. InfoPath is not a good reporting tool because of limitations in printing and performance to render long views. Hope this helps!