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Re: Pull data from a repeating table

Patrick Halstead — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:48:25 GMT

Hi again,

You have run into a common limitation of SharePoint - it only supports one table for promoted properties. If you were saving your data into SQL, you could define a child table for those values and quickly populate from the child table. It's because of this limitation, and many others, that we created our Database Accelerator web service suite. We have free trial version on our Qdabra.com website. End of sales pitch.

Let's say you don't want to (or can't) do the *right* thing and move to use SQL. You have a bunch of options - none are great - but I'll list them here anyway:

Promote all of the repeating values

Pro: relatively straightforward to do for small number of repeating fields
Con: requires a hack to your data source (to add the indvidual items) and rules to set the values. Doesn't scale past ~20 items. Hard to maintain.

Use Merge Forms to load a form from the site and import all values using XSL mapping

Pro: doesn't require a hack (e.g. #1)
Con: requires code (or manual operation to find the file to import) to automatically import form and some complicated XSL transform

Use code to load the form and parse the values

Pro: no hack and no complicated XSL
Con: more code

Form A writes values to a separate SharePoint list

Pro: cleaner solution; Form B just uses a SharePoint list adaptor and some filters
Con: requires code to parse values and save to separate SharePoint list

Form A sends values to Database (after submitting to SharePoint); Form B queries Database

Pro: no coding required; takes about 30 minutes to setup
Con: requires installing a Web Service like ours

Let us know if you want paid support to help you with any of these options.

Happy trails!

Re: Pull data from a repeating table

Sam — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:15:35 GMT

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I have 2 forms in 2 separate form libraries on the same sharepoint site.

In Form B i have a drop down list which pulls a unique value from Form A.

In Form B when the user select the unique value from the drop down list(used data connection here), I want the other 4 fields to be auto populated from Form A. --- I have got this far..

The problem i am facing is since values in Form A are in a repeating table when i call them in FormB in a text box they are all merged together. I cannot use concat or any other function..

Example of my repeating table in Form A: 1. A B C D ( all of them are in separate columns)

2. E F G H

Form B: textbox 1(1 2) text box 2 (A E) textbox 3: (B F) textbox 4: (CG) textbox5: (D H)

Re: Pull data from a repeating table

Patrick Halstead — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:02:56 GMT

Hi Hmalkan and welcome,

So, it sounds like you have two InfoPath forms (form A and form B) and you want to auto-populate values in form B with values from form A. Is that correct? Are these forms in separate form libraries on your SharePoint site? How does the workflow work? Do users open Form B and do File->Merge Forms from Form A? Or, are they trying to pull values from a SharePoint list view (populated with promoted properties from Form A) into Form B? I need more informaiton to understand your scenario.

Thanks

Pull data from a repeating table

Sam — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:48:34 GMT

Hello, I have a live form on a sharepoint site.

I have a repeating table where values are pulled in from an XML sheet. I am creating a new form which will be linked to the previous one.

What i need ito do is pull values from the repeating table to a text box in a proper format (each line separately).

At the moment all the data from the repeating table gets merged together in1 text box and cannot be separated.

Data needs to go from 4 separate fields in the repeating table from form A to the 4 separate text boxes in the form B.

Thanks for any help