InfoPath Dev

Hello: We're looking to refactor an enormous form (9 views, 300+ fields) that's in production into a series of smaller forms. This is a gigantic wizard form, where each view is representing a page in the form wizard. There are backward and forward buttons and a header menu on each page that allow users to jump to a particular page (provided current page passes minimum validation). Anyway, I was wondering if there were some solution using the InfoPath Form Web Part and have each view be its own form, and piecing together the navigation via a web part connection. The problem that I've seen is that the Web Part is designed for typical filters (URL, choice, etc.) to filter the data and not the form selection, since the form selection is set in the tool pane of the web part. I'm hoping that perhaps someone knows of a work-around or alternative solution. We're kind of on a tight timeline. The solution doesn't have to use this Web Part. The objective is taking the current large form and breaking it up into smaller forms, thus also breaking up the form library into corresponding smaller libraries and linking the form library items via a common key. So we can create related views for when the business wants to see the entries as 1 record. The hard part here is reproducing the current UI experience. I'm at a bit of a loss here. Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Epora75,

Breaking up a large form is good design since it aids in reusability of form "parts", lowers cost of maintenance and allows for multiple people to design the solution.

Like you say, stitching together separate forms does entail some extra configuration work to make sure they talk to one another.  Instead of backward and forward buttons you could use links that look like buttons but open new forms based on where they are in the "wizard".

You can also use the web part connectors and have the buttons set values for fields that are connected to another web part and then that web part will get the information and can update an adjacent frame to show the new information.

As far as I know there is no tool to automatically separate a larger form, so there will be manual steps.

Make sure you publish the forms as "content types" and this will allow you to support different libraries and yet updating the form template doesn't require republishing to all of the separate form libraries.

Good luck!

Thank you so much for your recommendations Patrick. I'm looking into a connected web parts option. Cheers!