InfoPath Dev

Hi Hilary
That works now perfectly, I just added one condition, the expression as per above and all is fine!
I'm not going to pretend I know why so I'll have to look up differences between relative and absolute paths

Since I;ve been trying to get this to work they have asked me to limit some path movements by user, now I believe you can't do this in a browser form but could potentially if it was done in InfoPath itself, so that's out
Do you think possible with some Power Automate?

I'll look it up but if you know any articles would be good
And thanks again for all the help on this , this can be useful for other things too now..

 So - with the relative path that was in your expression (which is what InfoPath will build by default, in general) the formula was comparing on just the individual data row - for the given title, it was looking at path in the same row. By changing that to an absolute path, the formula is comparing the title to all the returned paths. In terms of limiting by user (my goodness, this grows ever more complicated!) you can use the userName() function in InfoPath browser forms.... so I guess I would try:

1. Adding a column to the stages list that is a person/group, allow selection of persons only, and allow the selection of multiple persons
2. Update the stages data connection in your list to include the new column - this should end up being repeating in the data source
3. Then we'll have to change the filter on the dropdown again to check if the current user is in the list of users, if it isn't empty
4. So - for the stage paths that are restricted to specific users, you'll have to add those users to the list item...

If you need help with the filter on the dropdown, let me know....

Yes give them an inch and they want a mile!
Its all good though because I didn't think most of this would even be possible, so learning lots

I'm not familiar with the username() function so can you control views based on users with this method too?, would be most useful to be able to load only specific views for particular groups of users.

I can follow most of what you have outlined above but yes will need help with the filter change to pull in the user info

Cheers!

Not sure what "load specific views" means here - if you mean you want to switch the view on form load based on who the user is, yes, you can do that. The userName() function is a built in InfoPath function that returns the user's account id. Put a calculated value on your form and select the function using the formula builder and you'll see the result. At any rate you can have form load rules that change the view of the form, and your condition can be based on the user's name....

Yeah that's exactly what I mean.
There is a group of users who only need to see a very specific set of data and validate it, so I have created a view for this and want to ensure this is all they can see when they edit an item in the SharePoint list
. There's up to 100 users of this type, so its by user I take it?
Or again I'll be storing these users in a person column in another list anyway for something else so could employ the method you stated already, look in the column to see if user exists and if so then apply the rule?

Yup, you could query the list for the user (if in this other list the person / group column only allows a single user) or you could add a data connection to the list and return all the data, then use a condition in a form load rule to determine whether to switch views.... When you create a condition and select a field for the first dropdown in the condition builder there is a hard-to-notice dropdown on the field picker that lets you select "Any occurrence of" etc. on repeating fields - so you could use "any occurrence of" the field with the account id from your list matches the userName() function.