InfoPath Dev

I have designed a form that dynamically displays text and titles for various steps in a testing procedure at my company. The form works great and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out however I need to design a form to allow the engineers to type in the steps and their titles & descriptions. The description should be a rich text box while the title is a simple text box. The form is based on a SQL database. The problem is I can't figure out how to make the form allow me to create a rich text box from the description field on my SQL table. It tells me its not a "rich text" data type so I went into SQL and tried a few different data types to see if it will allow me to do a rich text box. If I chose any long data types (text, ntext, image, etc.), I can't submit my form so its useless. However, if I chose a normal text type (char, varchar, nchar, nvarchar) it does not allow a rich textbox to be bound to it.

The question is, how do you bind a rich text box to a field in a sql table? What is the required data type of the sql column to be bound to this rich text box?

Yes, this is a much complained about restriction between InfoPath and SQl/Access. To get around this you need to either use a Web service that will take your fields and place them in the appropriate database columns, or you will need to write code in your form to do so.

There are resources online that can be searched for that should give more information on either approach.

Greg Collins [InfoPath MVP]

I'm looking into a similar problem with Rich Text fields; can you point out some of these resources that talk about solving this issue...thanks, ssaral

Hello,

This issue has answers in the link below
http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2697

 

 Oh i like that. one person has put a link on here to another thread and the end solutiion is a link back to this thread. Anyway! there is a cheeky solution to this problem in infopath. Its not a rich text box but it is the next best thing if you want a multiline input.

 

Step 1: create a standard text box for the field in question

Step 2: click the base of the text box in question and drag it so its height increases to the desired sized and it looks like a rich text box.

Step 3: double click on the text box in question so it opens the properties box

Step 4: goto the tab marked "display"

Step 5: You should see tick box options for "Multi-line", "Paragraph Breaks" & "Wrap Text". Click all three.

You should now see that it acts very much like a rich text box as an input.