InfoPath Dev

Hi All,

I have been designing infopath 2010 forms containing multiple dropdown lists which need to be maintained in sharepoint lists.

Currently I am using seperate Sharepoint list for each dropdown control. Is it possible to maintain only one record in a sharepoint list for all dropdowns?

For ex. I have dropdowns like category and country list. I can create Master Data List with columns category and country and maintain different values seperated by comma or semicolon.

Master Data List

Title                        Country                              Category

Master row             India;Singapore;US              Contract;Permanent;Temporary

Is it possible to maintain dropdowns from such list? I appreciate your suggestions. 

Thanks,

Rahul Babar

Hi Rahul and congratulations on exceeding 50 posts on InfoPathDev!

This is one of the limitations of using SharePoint Lists as if they were database tables. Each list can represent a table but you can't have repeating structures within a row for that list. InfoPath won't parse out the values as separate XML items.

My recommendation is to use separate rows for each of these countries.

Good luck!

 Thanks Patrick :),

Basically I did not want to have too many data connections in the infopath forms.

Because there will be separate connection for each drop down list, I wanted to use only one list to avoid multiple connections.

I just wanted to confirm that the best way to fill drop downs from the sharepoint lists is to have separate list for each drop down.

Thanks,

Rahul Babar