InfoPath Dev

I have looked around the forum and nobody has quite answered my question.

I have a form which I am submitting to SharePoint.  I get the 'do you want to save Formx' message if the user tries to exit the form with outstanding changes - this is confusing for them as they don't understand the difference between saving and submitting, So I want to switch off the prompting on closing the form.  BUT I do want to warn users that IF they have made changes they could be lost. 

My simplest solution is to have 3 buttons - Submit, Exit Without Submitting, Exit.  I would make the buttons different colours so they stood out.
Exit Without Submitting should only be visible if there have been changes to the form
Exit should only be visible if there have not been any changes to the form since the last submit

How do I access the Form's Dirty flag from a conditional format ?  Or can I have a field which picks up the Dirty flag as a default value and then using conditional formatting based on that field?  I had thought of using a rule/after change to set a field's value to dirty if changes had been made but this would mean a lot of rules/code snippets from each of the fields and if the form already has a flag I could use it would be simpler.

Thank you

Catharine

You can use the following article to help you along the way: http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/greg/archive/2004/09/15/Use-Code-to-Determine-a-Rule-Condition.aspx

Since you will be using conditional formatting, you can skip the extra requirements needed to make this work with rule conditions.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for your help.  I now have my conditional formatting based on a value in from code.  A couple of questions for clarity please.

As I was using conditional formatting I did not need to edit the manifest - but if I did would this be the correct command for  Infopath 2007? or should I change the 2003 to 2007 ?

When a form is submitted, should the dirty flag be reset to false?  automatically ? (At the moment it does not seem to be the case in my form) Or is it something I should be re-setting manually ? or is there another flag to indicate whether something has not been submitted ? 

I am trying to have an EXIT button appear if everything has been submitted - but EXIT Without submit button if there are updates to abandon.

Thank you

Catharine

Hi again

I have tried adding the above line of code into the manifest and once saved and trying to re-open I get an error message - it is not a valid document -

I am just pasting the above line before the > in the xsf:xDocumentClass 

Any ideas

Catharine

Hello,

Good news if you use InfoPath 2007, this namespace is allready declared in a new InfoPath 2007 template, so you can skip that.

If you use(d) InfoPath 2003 to create the template you probably made mistake adding the namespace declaration to the manifest.xsf file.

An example:

• The namespace in manifest.xsf:
  <xsf:xDocumentClass  [...some more stuff...] xmlns:xdDate="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/xslt/Date" xmlns:my="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/myXSD/2008-04-25T15:33:31" xmlns:xdExtension="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/xslt/extension">
  
  Do not change to 2007!
  
• The IsDirty function (jscript):
  function isDirty()
  {
       return XDocument.IsDirty;
  }
  
• Conditional formatting on a button
  Hide when xdExtension:isDirty() = true()

Goodluck

Thanks Albert for jumping in with some answers!

What if the user just decides to close the form (file->Exit) or by clicking the X in the upper right hand corner? Will they get a warning that they haven't submitted the form?

Without code as requested http://alecpojidaev.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/how-to-check-if-your-form-is-dirty/