Newbie Questions

Re: Question regarding XML file usage to create/update InfoPath form

bryanf — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:49:51 GMT

Thanks for the reply Patrick! You certainly make it sound easy, I have no idea what you are talking about unfortunately but you did give me some areas to focus on at least and hopefully I will be able to come up with something.

Thanks again for the help!

Re: Question regarding XML file usage to create/update InfoPath form

Patrick Halstead — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:32:13 GMT

Hi BryanF and welcome!

Thanks for your post and patience over the holidaze.

Your project is easy to do with InfoPath. You'll want to create a secondary XML data source and add it as a data connection to your form. The trick is making the query dynamic. You could add all of the servers as datas connections and then add rules with conditions to query the correct one but if you have more than 20 or so this is going to be a chore. To make the server queries data-driven will require either a Web service or some code in the form. That's the only tricky thing. However, if it's less than 20, just create the form with them as conditioned rules. That's easy.

To setup the email to you, just add another data connection to submit the form via email. That's super easy.

Have a piece of Christmas Cake,

Question regarding XML file usage to create/update InfoPath form

bryanf — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:03:51 GMT

Hello all-

My apologizes if this has been asked before, I am still searching through the posts. Let me explain what I would "like" to do and then maybe some you more experienced users can tell me if it's possible and if so hopefully provide some tips for me. Any advice at all would be very helpful as I am not familiar with InfoPath.

I have six remote locations with an IT Support staff in each one. Since starting with this company a few months ago I have come to the conclusion that these guys are not doing regular daily checks. So my thought was to basically create a checklist for them. I would like to use an XML file if possible for easier editing in the future... so for example I would like to list each site in the file so that when they open the InfoPath form they can choose their location from a dropdown box. From there the form would "know" to use the information in the XML file under that location's section. The reason for this is that they all obviously have different server names, it seems that backups are not standard either and so on, so I would like to customize it for each location.

So in essence the XML would list the six locations that will be used in a dropdown box at the top of the form. It will auto populate the time and date, etc. Once the location has been chosen the form would then find the location's section in the XML file which lists the various servers, backups, system checks, etc. They would have a checkbox or radio button saying something like c"hecked, no issues found" and one that states there are issues. If there are issues then obviously I need for them to also have a text box to enter the issues they discovered as well as another text box to enter the ticket number generated from our Helpdesk ticketing system. At the end of the form they would simply have a submit button and that would email the file to me.. eventually I may want to integrate this with SharePoint for now I think an email with attachment is probably the easiest solution.

Is what I am thinking even possible? Is it a good solution or are there better ways to do what I want?

Thank you in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer.