InfoPath Dev

Hi All,

From the Great White North!

The organization I work for is now starting to investigate usage of InfoPath and currently we have started to use InfoPath 2003.  The department I work in has a mix of IT and developers and the focus has changed to electronic forms.  Now the projects we are doing involves many types of databases,  smart forms, workflow pathing, signatures etc. The issue we have is the items and connections we are attempting really require us to move to 2007 both in sharepoint and infopath.  So my question is how do let the powers to be know that upgrading sooner then later is a very good idea. Is there some real hard facts that show the advantages of Infopath 2007 over 2003. I have already been to the microsoft site and used the sales pitch listed from the their site.

Our group does not want to waste time on 2003 if all our needs are met in the 2007 version - yes, its a great learning platform but boy does 2003 really shows its weaknesses when you push on its limits which cause out projects to fail. Our biggest problem is multiple database connections to SQL even with views newly created.  Some databases have the relationships we require however, the data doesn't populate the data fields when our queries are run - don't know why?  We have full access to the data and full rights but we are finding that 2003 has some issues on the creation of secondary tables when adding to the main table.  I don't know if we are missing something from the connection wizard so any help would be appreciated.

I think, I may be asking alot of questions from this site and sofar the information we have used has been very good - btw I have shown our entire group this website and are impressed by the quality of the answers found in the forums.

Thanks In advance for any answers given.

Mark. 

Hey Mark.

This is a common scenario.  I am guessing you are using ODC connections to databases and the limitations are driving you crazy. I have been there. Unfortunately a lot of those are still present with ODC connections in 2007.

Using a SQL backend is the best way to go.  If you want to do enterprise form solutions right, the way Microsoft and other large companies do electronic forms, you want to look at using web services.  That is where the performance and flexibility are acheived. It also will make your developement and maintenance of your solutions much faster and easier.

I would start by looking at the Database Accellerator suite. This gives you everything you need out of the box for SQL and Sharepoint integration.  It has worked great for me. Especially if you are committed to InfoPath and doing a lot of integrated solutions.  You get one tool set that you can use over and over again and have everything consistent.

Database Accelerator works the same with 2003 and 2007 and can allow you to begin creating solutions without wasting your time or missing a lot of the features. IP2007, and especially SP2007, are definitly worth it and have good features but your transition is not as dependent on what you can do or waiting for them.

I would recommend you have Qdabra support give you a demo so you can see what is possible and how it might work for your needs. 

Hi Clay,

Thanks for your speedy reply.  One thing when you mention web service are you developing it yourself or does the suite do it for you.  Just wondering since we do have the ability to create our own service but if the suite is good and we don't need to re-create the wheel and save time.  One thing I should mention is that with the databases we are picking from one we have no issue however, if you have 2 databases in separate locations as an example one for finance and one for service parts infopath 2003 does not have the ability from what we can tell to join the 2 databases and pull data based - unable to create a query or data return for the second database.  If we are using one data base then we are able to pull by using Add Table and this is not an issue unless we are over looking something simple for 2 databases.

Basically, we are trying to pull the part number out based on a Duns number and the address of the Maker from another database, unfortunately we are unable to get the database guys to create 1 database with both Duns and Maker - strictly due to a mainframe associated costs of conversion.  We are trying to get the data dumped to a sql backend or access depending on what we can do. 

 I do think we have an issue with how the database was first designed 10 years ago but well the future is here now and we do need to work with legacy systems so, with that in mind how do you find the suite that you mentioned above would it work in with this type of system and are there others who have used it that can give input?

Thanks,

Mark

Yes you can create your own, but you realize the advantage of not recreating the wheel. DBXL, has years of development and refinement.  And you can both query and submit to multiple tables. I beleive you can even go to seperate Databases, but I have not tried that specifically. that would be something to explore with them.  Otherwise you may need a data warehouse or replicate some tables.  The SQL backend is probably ideal.

Unfortunately, the Qdabra Web Services cannot perform single queries on multiple databases.

Are both of your databases located on the same database server?  If they are, I would think it would be a simple matter of creating a view (database view, not InfoPath view) to pull the data from both databases.