InfoPath Dev

We are "newbies" with "some" development background who are interested in developing solutions where we:

•use Infopath (2007) as our primary data entry tool
•store the resulting Infopath data in an XML-type column in SQL Server 2005
•use Sharepoint as the user interface structuren for the remainder of the solution
•use XQuery against the stored Infopath data in SQL Server 2005 for complex searches

We do not want to store the Infopath data in Sharepoint because:

•the performance issues associated with a large number of documents in a Sharepoint folder
•there are too many tags sets to realistically use the tag --> column promotion feature of Sharepoint
•Sharepoint does not support the concept of repeating structures within its column promotion feature
•any Sharepoint search will have a time delay between "crawls" - we need to do a true query against the data

We think that we are missing some fundamental concept. We can retrieve sample data from the SQL XML-type column via a data connection (using either a direct query or a stored procedure; with or without XQuery) but Infopath always sees that data as pure text that happens to contain tags - Infopath never connects the character sequences with the concept of an XML structure.

What are we missing? Are there any articles that directly deal with the integration of Infopath with the XML-type of SQL Server 2005? Or, is there a specific chapter in a book that we should be reading?

Thank you for any input.

You might want to take a look at our Database Accelerator product:http://www.qdabra.com/proddetail.asp?prod=QDBXL1 - it seems like it would fit your scenario rather well.

However, instead of storing the entire form into a single xml column, you would be shredding the tables in the XML into relational tables in the database. Although it is not usually supported, if you work extremely carefully you could then reconstitute the XML from the relational tables (to do this in InfoPath would require a good deal of code). This would give you the advantage of using SQL search and reporting functionality instead of mucking around with XQuery, which can get pretty complicated. Also, DBXL has a new feature set that allows you to run searches on the shredded database with either a desktop or a mobile client (PocketPC)!

Otherwise, I'm not sure why InfoPath is treating the data from the xml columns as plaintext. You would think since you are using IP2007 that it would recognize it, but I haven't worked much with this platform, so I'm not sure what to tell you.