Newbie Questions

Re: Reports out of the Sharpoint (2007) Form Library

Ted Fitch — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:44:19 GMT

Hi, reporting out of SharePoint is going to be problematic. SharePoint can export data directly to Excel or to Access but repeating data is going to be a big problem due to the way SharePoint/InfoPath merge all the data from a repeating field into one field in promoted properties. We have a video about the challenges of SharePoint reporting here. In the video you will also see a demo of how we solve this problem using our proprietary tool called Database Accelerator (DBXL).

We developed DBXL to address the reporting gaps in SharePoint and with DBXL you can "shred" (parse) the InfoPath fields to SQL for easy reporting. DBXL also includes the option to report on that SQL data via an Excel web service method that pulls the data from SQL into an Excel spreadsheet so you can do pivot tables etc in Excel. This Excel web service even will allow you to connect to SQL views from that same SQL DB which is very helpful if you want to do relational reporting on multiple InfoPath forms.

We offer a free evaluation of DBXL here. I would also be happy to talk to you in person about the value proposition of DBXL and some exciting new features coming out in our next version (including a new server version & a standalone client version of the tool). You can contact us via the link here.

Ted

Re: Reports out of the Sharpoint (2007) Form Library

eissayouf — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:20:18 GMT

Thanks for the response. I have used properly promotions for some of the columns to use in the workflow. I guess I have to add all of the columns to the property promotions, since I am not sure what columns will be needed in an ad-hoc report. Also, can you please explain what tools are you using for reporting on document library? How you can extract all data from there and put in an Excel or SQL server?

Re: Reports out of the Sharpoint (2007) Form Library

Qazi Anis — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:03:32 GMT

you can use property promotion, so that the key fields in your form are promoted as columns in your document library, then you can have your reports on them

Reports out of the Sharpoint (2007) Form Library

eissayouf — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:02:09 GMT

Hi, I am submitting data from InfoPath to a SharePoint form library and upon submission a workflow starts and then workflow updates several custom columns on that SharePoint from library. Everything looks that works fine. The only issue that I have is that users want reports out of that SharePoint Form library and I don’t know how to do this. I don't see any easy way to get the reports out of that SharePoint library. The only way that I can think of, is to extract all data from that SharePoint library and insert them to a SQL server table and create reports using Crystal Reports or SQL Server reporting services. Is there any other easier approach? If not, can somebody show me how I can extract data from a SharePoint Form Library?