Newbie Questions

Re: Populating a second drop-down list box

JustinL — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:35:12 GMT

Thank you for your help! Turns out the problems I had were Access side :X I truly appreciate the advice though.

Re: Populating a second drop-down list box

warrtalon — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:41:10 GMT

Have you tried doing it? I don't mind helping, but I don't plan on spelling it all out if you haven't actually spent a lot of time doing your own trial and error.

Without giving step-by-step, here are the main pieces:

1) Create a data connection to whatever your data source is that will populate the dropdown list in InfoPath.

2) Create a two data elements in InfoPath for storing the dropdown selections.

3) Drag those two data elements to the canvas and change them to dropdown lists.

4) Configure the properties of each dropdown to point to the data connection from #1. Be sure to choose a proper Display and Value (can be the same or different). The display is what users will say, but the value is what is stored in the XML.

5) When configuring the 2nd dropdown to connect to the data connection, click on the filter button and tell it to only show items where Data Element #1 is equal to a value in the list.

Somewhere in your data source, the 2nd set of selections has to be tied to some unique value in the first set of selections. You haven't mentioned what your data really is, so...

Re: Populating a second drop-down list box

JustinL — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:31:33 GMT

Yes, that's exactly what I want to do. The question is HOW! :)

Re: Populating a second drop-down list box

warrtalon — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:26:04 GMT

It's simple to do unless you uare using browser-enabled forms.

For rich client, you just set the 2nd drop-down to filter its data based off the selection in the 1st drop-down.

Populating a second drop-down list box

JustinL — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:49:29 GMT

Sorry ahead of time if this seems really noob of me :D

I'm just starting with Infopath. I am trying to create a section of a form with two drop-down list boxes; the selection made in the first needs to determine which choices populate the second. I've poked around here, but I think part of my problem is that I am not very familiar with the terminology used to describe infopath elements.

Anyhow, thanks ahead of time for any direction ya'll could offer me!

Justin