Newbie Questions

Re: Managing dropdown lists with XML files

Shiraz Cupala — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 01:26:17 GMT

In InfoPath 2007 coming soon, a feature called the Data Connection Library will actually provide this type of favorites list functionality. It's probably not exactly what you're looking for but similar.

Re: Managing dropdown lists with XML files

Matt Faus — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:58:26 GMT

To modify the data connection without having to revisit the drop-downs click "Modify" on the Data Connections wizard instead of "Remove" and then "Add". After clicking modify, browse to your updated XML file and add it. You might notice that when InfoPath copies the XML doc into the solution it might append a number to the end of the filename to specify it from the previous internal XML file.

The favorites list is a cool idea. I think a little bit more information is necessary to tackle it though. If you want to set a global favorites list (i.e. User-independent) then you could just add a "favorite" field to each of the nodes and when you populate the favorites drop-down list use a data filter to include only those entries.

Hope this helps, let us know your progress on the favorites thing!

Managing dropdown lists with XML files

spudy — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:55:39 GMT

Hopefully someone can provide some wisdom on a couple of issues for me.

I have dropdown lists that are populated from an XML file. On adding the datasource I was prompted to add the XML file to the form, which I did. As I develop more items are required to be added to dropdown lists.

Is there a way I can re-add the modified XML file without having to remove and then add the dataconnection again. This one XML file feeds numerous dropdowns and each time I am having to revisit each dropdown and point them back to the dataconnection.

A separate issue but on similiar theme is that I have one dropdown list that holds somewhere in the region of 1300 items (yeah I know, it is excessive - but until the business logic is applied there is little I can do!)

What I want to do is give the option to set items as favourites. This would write the selected items to an XML file which would then be used to populate another dropdown list of Favourites. Problem is that as the file resides outside of the form a security warning occurs each time the form is loaded. Is it possible to include this in the form and still permit the user to add items?

Spudy.