InfoPath Dev

Hi; I'm relatively new to infopath and have recently tried to create a form for my new employer by request. The issue being is its being more of a pain than it appears to be worth. To be clear i'm running on 2003.

Okay, so a brief detail on the form and its purpose; I'm working for a shipping company and ships come and go. To facillitate the whole process i'm making a form to both add new ships as well as make return ships that much easier; simply select them from the drop down list and voila; the ships details are there. I have gotten to the point in which I have a form that can fill itself out sucessfully; which would be great; except that the form now fails at what its purpose is: for return ships the form fills out entirely, however, not all information will stay consistent such as the person that contracted the ship as well as the file number of the new voyage. As such, is it possible to make it so the form only fills in certain sections? I've attempted to make it query the data base twice; once for owners details and once for ship details however it simply fills in the whole document or nothing at all. I beleive this is occuring as the two databases are linked by an ID however removing that link and attatching it to something else, say the file number, seems to completely blank the form. Best case scenario I would like the form to have multiple drop boxes to query; one for the ship, one for the owner, etc... etc... in which the query only fills in the related sections. Is this possible? Thanks for your help and sorry for the lengthy explanation.

Have you used secondary datasources for the drop down list of ships?

Use a similar method (or read up on secondary datasources) to retrieve the details of the selected ship from another secondary datasource using the selected ship field as the filter and copy those values into your main datasource fields as required.

Skarn:

Have you used secondary datasources for the drop down list of ships?

Use a similar method (or read up on secondary datasources) to retrieve the details of the selected ship from another secondary datasource using the selected ship field as the filter and copy those values into your main datasource fields as required.

 The issue i've found using the secondary datasources is that when doing I query, the form is filled out with every single possibliity found in the database. On your advice though I'll certainly read through everything I've found again to get a better understanding of them. I would also like the ability for the form to update the database for any new additions, such as a new owner, not only new ships, and as far as I know this is impossible to submit to a secondary datasource? Also, if I were to somehow to submit to both the secondary and main datasource, would they not retain the same ID in access and as such be inseperable? When you say "Copy those values into your main datasource" do you mean manually? There is alot more information in the form that is ship specific than my example detailed and it would simply be impractical to have to copy each individual piece of information over.