InfoPath Dev

Hi all,

Im new, First I want to say hello to all.

And I have a problem in IP,

I create a form which have a  COMPANY field, this field receive a SharePoint list but its so large (over 1000 items), the problem is so hard to find right company for this field. Is there any solution for this? I saw a form that have same problem. That form have a button, after click this, it appear a new window for user to search, and the result will fill back to the orgin form.

could you show me how to do this?

Thanks.

Hi there and welcome to the forums.

The issue of large SharePoint lists is pretty common. Unfortunately, I don't know of an out-of-the-box solution for it. Some people opt for filtering.

For example, say you have customer data. You create two dropdowns: Country and Customer Name. As the user fills out the form, they first select Country, which then filters the Customer Name dropdown to a more managable size. I don't know if this is possible in your data but it's a common option.

The caveat: If you want to filter what is returned from the server, you will have to use a Web Service. SharePoint provides a bunch of Web services, but I'm not sure if they allow filtering on a list, especially server-side. We do this a lot using our Database Accelerator. We filter the contents from SharePoint and/or SQL.

If you want to filter client side, you can do this in InfoPath, but it means your form will still have to load all the records. In which case the performance of the form load will be affected.

As far as the solution you cite, I'm not sure how it was created (I've never seen it), but with code you can achieve a lot! Good luck!

Ernesto, you can do server-side filtering using views (XML list view), and then you can make multiple data connections that are set not to query until activated through a rule or something...such as when a country is selected, it will then only return the set of companies related to that company based on a pre-set company view in the list.  This is better than pulling all the data down at form load, but I don't know if this concept will help the OP.

Hi all,

With SharePoint list i see a solution name lookup with picker link: http://www.codeplex.com/lookupwithpicker

Is there and way to do in infopath?

Hope you are still out there.  I am looking to complete a similar task.  I developed the form when I only had about 1000 items in my sharepoint list and performance was good.  I know that I had about 9000 more items to add to the list, but didn't consider how much my performance would fall off.  Now that all items are in the list, the form performs very poorly.  Load time is not a real concern, although pretty slow.  My real concern is that I am using a 4 level cascading list.  It now takes 15 to 20 seconds to make a selection from each drop down box.  I have heard to use a CAML query, but don't know anything about that.  When you mention using multiple data connections and then just pulling them by a rule, etc., does that mean that my data would have to be inseparate lists?  My data is currently in one list and then I sort it in the dropdowns by class, size, type, then description.  Any additional information would be appreciated.

Hi,

There are some known issues with InfoPath and data connections - basically no server side filtering takes place, InfoPath pulls back the entire data set and all filtering happens in the form which means the client is going to take a hit while that data comes down the wire.  We have seen quite a few customer issues with this including forms that take minutes to load and minutes to filter one item to the next.

There are some ways to optimize this in the form, we do provide support for this with one of our experts who can look at your form and analyze it and look at how you are doing the queries.

We also have developed a tool called "Qdabra Web Services Solution Pack" which can also solve this problem quite nicely.  There is a trial version you can download from our website and following our documentation try it out with your form to see how it works.

Hope that helps

Ted

Hi BPChris1

In this case, I use SLP solution. Some time I have some problem with javascript when use this solution but I think this is the best for me in this case, you can download it here: http://hermansberghem.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-download-slp-infopath-extension.html

 @Ted Fitch: thanks