InfoPath Dev

Hi there, completely new to all this but have learned tons from this site.... here is my question/situation.

On my form I have a dropdown called "training type" with three choices.  GB, BB and MBB.  I have made it all the way through the user roles etc, and now I am at the actual sending of the email.  What I want to do is put a formula or function or whatever it is called, that will autopopulate the subject line based upon what was chosen in the dropdown.  For exampe, if GB was selected, then I would like the subject line of the email to put in  GB - nomination form, and if BB was selected the subject would read BB - nomination form. 

 I am unclear how to do this.  I click on the FX button but then I get lost as to what I am doing.....

 Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!

I am using IP2007, but saving as IP 2003, since all my users are on 03.

 thanks much

Paula

Welcome Paula.

Do you have the specific text for each of the three options already in your form? If so you could maybe use that but I will assume you do not.

How I would do this is add one more field to your form.  it could be called SubjectText or something. I would put a rule on your dropdown that sets the text in SubjectText.  So if drop-down = "GB" set field value "Green Baby" or what ever text you want. Then add another rule if drop-down = "BB" set field value "Blue Baby" etc.

Then in your email data connection you can just use the Subject Text field and it will have the correct text in it.

Have Fun!

Hi pmlanning,

If the subject is not much specific to individual choice and you just need " - nomination form" extra with the combination of choice, then the extra field is also not needed. take concat(option field, " - nomination form") function in the subject field of email.

Hope this will help you.

Thanks guys that helped alot!!... now for my latest disaster....

Once I got the form working properly, and I was ready to test the email feature, and see if what I did actually worked, it didn't.... why you ask?

Because we are a Lotus Notes company and not Outlook.  I thought it would send the email through sharepoint.  Like when I use sharepoint and I have alerts set up to tell me when someone has loaded a document.  I am publishing the form to a forms library and then filling out the form and when I hit submit it wants outlook....

I created the form in IP07, but saved it in IF03, since that is what my user base is using.

I am not a programmer by any means, just learning my way through, so any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated....

 go easy on me....

 Thanks
Paula

Sorry Paula, it requires Outlook. 

Another option might be using the alerts functionality in SharePoint, this sends out email ok with a link. It just requires users to subscribe to the form library.  The only other options are creating your own SMTP mail process, which would probably not be worth it, or maybe using a webservice or database as a trigger. When the form submits it updates some trigger field on a server which then carries out some notification process, etc.

 Not a lot of options without exchange. I would go with leveraging SharePoint more.  You may be able to populate a list and create a special web part that alerted users to pending forms, etc.

Sorry. :(

Thanks Clay, I had a feeling that was the answer. Tell me this, if I upgrade to SPS 3.0, would that help anything with using the forms in a web browser? What I am trying to avoid is having people have to sign up for an account on sharepoint for this particular site.  Basically what is happening, is a user needs to fill out a nomination form to go to a particular type of training, and then their leader/manager needs to approve it. And with over 60k employees, potentially any of them can need this form.  The way I have the form set up, is the candidate provides us with their leaders email and then poof the form would be sent... This form looks great!! And I can't use it... boooooooo....

Right now I am running SP 2.0 on the server, but was going to upgrade to 3.0, with the help of my old boss who is a programming wizard, but of course knows nothing about infopath... anyways....  I am confused about the whole "server 2007 vs sp 3.0".... is there a difference and would upgrading help me at all, getting these forms out to the users via the web?? 

Thoughts??....

Thanks

Paula

I don't think the version upgrade would really affect this. This is a great, out-of-the-box solution, with Outlook. 

You should be able to give Domain Users group access to the site or the form library and not have to worry about individual permissions or creating a SharePoint account.  You may mean the setting up of alerts for bosses.

One questino I had is with Lotus notes, if the user does a Send To Mail Recipient from the File menu, does this work?  If it did you would just need to instruct users how to manually email the form, but this may require Outlook too, I cannot test.

Otherwise you could promote the approvers email into SharePoint as an additional field.  So completed forms would be listed with the email address and someone could manually monitor the form library and email links out for approval. Not ideal but could be better than a paper process.

 Losing the email submit makes it pretty difficult, I would be frustrated too.  You may want to look at the Database Accelerator Download.  If you want to pursue Electonic Form Solutions with InfoPath then with this and our catalog format you can create your own workflows, assignments, and approvals within InfoPath using a SQL database.  It gives you active directory access, secures your forms, integrates with SharePoint, gives you lots of other great functionality.  I would check it out and see if it might help you.

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