InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I have designed my first form on infopath and have a query.

It's a form which users can use to book a training course. Once the course delegate has filled it in, the submit button will then send it to their line manager for authorisation - the LM will tick a box saying Authorise. Is there a way to lock the whole form except for the authorisation field so that everything the delegate has inputed cant be changed?

Thanks in advance.

Do you already utilize digital signatures? I think that digital signatures would be the surest way of making sure that other users can't change the information.

However, if you don't utilize them already, digital signatures might be time consuming to implement.

You could consider different views on the form: The LM tick box could live on a view of the form where all course delegate information is presented in static format that can't be changed (use an expression box). The result would be that the LM would be less likely to change information the user filled out since his/her tick box is not on a view where they can change something. However, if they go to the other view they can still change the information.

I havent looked into digital signitures yet and we don't currently use them but I will certainly consider it.

I thought about a different view, but the LM will need to read the delegates details.

Some delegates will require two authorisations, one LM and Department Head, so was going to put the field in a repeating region, so the first authorisation entry would also need to be read only.

Thanks for your help.

Here's a link I found with some information on the digital signautres, sounds like a similar question to yours:

http://www.mcse.ms/archive180-2005-8-1791212.html

Thanks Ted I will check this out.

nickdavid,

One other thing, have you looked into doing this with the use of "user roles" in the InfoPath forms? I believe that you can specify read only with user roles pretty easily, this might be a much easier solution that digital signatures.

The way to do this is using "conditional formatting". For each field you can set conditional formatting to make a field read-only based on another field or a role. With roles you have to know the user's login names. However, you can add a rule on the submit button to set the status value of a hidden field on the form (a node in the data source that doesn't have a control on the view). Then your "conditional read-only" can be set based on that node.