Newbie Questions

Re: Design Database or Form First

Ted Fitch — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:45:28 GMT

Ernesto makes some very good points.

DB bound forms are a pain to work with down the road, we have plenty of customers who have come to us over the years with DB bound forms becoming totally fed up with the time it takes to maintian their forms. There are plenty of times where you have fields you want in your form that don't need to be in the DB but if your form is DB bound you have to add them to the DB first and then update InfoPath.

Qdabra Software provides a number of tools to help you out with your InfoPath development. We also offer InfoPath and SharePoint training: http://www.qdabra.com/en/training/InfoPath_Master_Class.aspx.

We offer trianing for both InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath 2010. Since this is your first form you might want to consider one of our 3 day training webinars.

Good luck!

Ted

Re: Design Database or Form First

ErnestoM — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:52:34 GMT

Hello,

I imagine you're talking about SQL and creating a database-bound InfoPath form. You have to create the database first, then allow InfoPath to create the form based on that (see attached screenshot).

We don't work much with database bound forms because, well, they are database bound. :) That is, once created, you can't go back and change the schema easily. Submitting to SQL is a classic InfoPath problem and here are options discussed in an earlier thread:

If you create your form using an XML Schema (File->Design...->New from Blank) you can't submit directly to a DB. That's because the schema is XML and not based off SQL data types. Submitting directly to a DB after form creation was never an option in InfoPath.
If you create your form from a DB, you already have the submit data connection built in.
Best practice here is to submit to a Web Service as an XML string. Have the Web Service handle the mapping to SQL. Then, one Web Service can handle any form. This is the way Qdabra's Web Service Suite (DBXL) works. Free downloads and very inexpensive licenses will save you a lot of time and money.

There are other previous discussions which all point to the three solutions:

(a) You create a db-bound form.
(b) You write/maintain your own web service.
(c) You use a product like DBXL to map the data from InfoPath to SQL.

This is a great post which covers b and c. Good luck!

Design Database or Form First

jeremyrm — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:57:59 GMT

This is my first time creating an info path form. Should I create the database or the form first in my planning phase.