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Re: Storing a form by an external application when user saves the form

cpalm — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:31:52 GMT

Hi Patrick,

maybe I give a little more background on this: A local version of MS SQL Server is installed on every client-tablet-pc. I've set up a replication scenario to synchronize to a central database where all the users occasionally connect to. Every form is saved in an xml-column as one row. Conflict management is done when synchronizing but it's quite unnecessary as the users (medical practicioners) don't visit the same patient filling out the same form...

Offering a web service in general is not form independent and that's a major design goal of my application. The whole form and solution management is done by the application to just have infopath as an editor platform for the users. Forms (xsn's) are also stored in the database and automatically replicated to all clients. Therefore the latest form versions are installed automatically (by RegisterSolution).

At first I simply wondered why I can do everything remotely from my application. I could even register my OnSave-Event but unfortunately it's never fired... So it seems to me the integration of Infopath in external applications is a bit lose.

Re: Storing a form by an external application when user saves the form

Patrick Halstead — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:21:35 GMT

Hi CPalm,

This seems like overkill to me. Are you doing this to provide some kind of offline help? What happens when they go back online and submit to the DB? Does it reconcile the version submitted? If not, how do you prevent other people from editing.

If you absolutely need offline support, you could just use InfoPath's built-in support with some simple logic in your form to check a Web Service and see if they are online and then conditionally enable a submit which sends the form to the database (all without code). We've done many solutions that are offline-able. The best solution is to write code and check the DB on submit to see if there is a more recent version and pop-up some kind of delta reconciliation UI if there is a more recent one saved. But, you say you can't write code. You could write code in a Web Service and call this from the form.

Anyway, seems like your solution is overkill.

Storing a form by an external application when user saves the form

cpalm — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:29:46 GMT

Hi,

I'm writing a C# application that invokes Infopath as an editor. The file originally stored in a SQL Database is put into a local directory before. This works fine but it seems to be complicated to detect from outside (not from within the form) when the user afterwards has saved the form to disk.
I don't want to have any special code in a form since users want to create they're own forms and my application simply wants to store them.

I've tried working with InfoPath events but unfortunately they're not forwarded when InfoPath is invoked as external app. Is it really the best way to have a FileSystemWatcher look after the file being saved or is there a better approach than:

1. Optional for existing forms: Copy form to disk
2. Invoke Infopath by Application.open() or Application.NewFromSolution();
3. Call SaveAs to set an initial filename in case of NewFromSolution() (so that a user can simply click save)
4. Wait for a FileSystemWatcher.OnChange event
5. Save to file into the database

Thanks for any help

cpalm