InfoPath Dev

Hi all,

I have a pretty lengthy infopath 2003 document that has a lot of conditional hiding/showing of sections depending on the options picked.  The logic is actually getting pretty tough to manage, but I'll address that later.

What I want to do is pretty simple in theory.  If a section is hidden by an option that is picked, not only do I want to hide it, but I also want to make sure that action defaults all the values in the section that it hides.  Now, I know I can create rules to do this, but some of these sections have dozens of elements in them, and there are several sections.  It would be nice if there is some way that you could "default" a section with a built in option without code, or at least with a simple command that is tied to an event.  I am trying to keep this document as basic as possible, but it's turning into "spaghetti" with all the rules and conditional formatting I am having to do.

 Trying to avoid as much code as I can because I am a beginner at this.

 On the logic piece, if anyone has advice on how to manage rules and conditional formatting, this would be welcome.  I have no holistic way to view all of the logic I have in this document, short of visiting the properties page of every control and looking at the rules and formatting options individually.  I have read people recommending it be put in code, but I do not even know how to begin doing this.  Is visual studio needed? Or can it be done "out of the box"?
 

 Any advice?

 
Thanks guys!

Ryan
 

Hey Ryan,

It can get pretty hairy, good form design is important.

Does the form use views?  If there are several scenarios for forms, it often works well to have multiple views, instead of multiple hidden sections within one view, this can reduce the logic.

As far as defaults, typically you can set a universal default for a given field.  If values will be determined by user selection then you would have to use rules.

Even with code, finding all of the rules and conditions can be a tedious process.

Another option that can help is to use a data source to store default values.  If you have multiple "sets" of values they can be stored as XML or in a database and then when a default is needed you could possible get a set of values instead of each individual one.

Those are my thoughts.

Good Luck.