InfoPath Dev

Hi Infopath friends,

 I'm an 21 year old german student working on an Infopath - SharePoint Project (I'm still at the beginning). My last time I spent with reading blogs and searching for information about Infopath itself and about the connection from Infopath to Sharepoint. I'm not sure wheter I understand the primary intention (from Microsoft) for Infopath and Sharepoint or not. So, I hope you can help me a little bit...

 
In my opinion Infopath is for collecting information efficiently. You can achieve almost everyone because Infopath Forms can be developed for Mobile Devices and Web Browsers. The connection to the Sharepoint Server is for storing and providing Infopath forms. The filled out forms will be safed in Sharepoint libraries.

So, i hope my perspective of Infopath and Sharepoint is correct, isn't it?

 
Furthermore I had a few questions:

1. Is it possible to create a Web based form that includes dynamic elements? E.g. I had 2 fields (Department, Department Chief). The first field is a drop down box with the departments. The second field is a list. So the content of the list should be adapt to the first field. Is that possible in a Web based form? (If not, is it possible in a normal Infopath form?). And can I use a database to provide the fieldinformation?

2. The easiest way to safe filled out forms is a library. But is it possible to safe the content of the form in a list? So that everyone fill out a web based form and all the data sets will be stored as list items in a Sharepoint list.

So thats it for the moment :-)!

Thank you for helping me!

 
Matze

 

InfoPath and SharePoint are designed to work well together. However, SharePoint is not the only option for saving your forms. You can save to file, or to a database or a web service (which using a Web service provides any number of options).

1. Web forms and standards forms can create dynamic elements, such as selecting an item in a drop-down populating a separate list. The difference is that the native form will be much faster and more elegant in the performance of these types of events. The web form will likely need to round-trip to the server in this scenario, causing short waits for the users.

2. InfoPath can be set up to save data out to a SharePoint list, but it will require that you code it yourself. You can easily get data from a SharePoint list, but posting back to a SharePoint list requires that you write custom code to do so.

Very nice, thank you! That's what I've thought. Are their any tutorials for this two problems? 

Thanks a lot! 

For cascading lists (one list populating a second list upon selection):
http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/greg/archive/2005/07/06/Create-a-Cascading-List-from-a-Hierarchical-Data-Source.aspx
http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/greg/archive/2005/07/14/Create-a-Repeating-Cascading-List-from-a-Hierarchical-Data-Source.aspx
http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/greg/archive/2005/07/06/Create-a-Cascading-List-from-a-Flat-Data-Source.aspx
http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/greg/archive/2005/07/14/Create-a-Repeating-Cascading-List-from-a-Flat-Data-Source.aspx

For saving to a SharePoint list:
http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/matt/archive/2006/02/02/Add-SharePoint-List-Items-with-InfoPath.aspx