InfoPath Dev

Hi and thanks in advance for the help!

I went through the trouble of designing a dynamic and clean form, but now I am a little hung up on how to deploy it to my users.

I have a table from an ODBC source which is a list of employees.

I want to make a web page that show the list of employees, when the user clicks on an employee, the server will send the user an infopath form with some of the employee-specific data pre-populated.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Hi,

I hope this link will help you.

http://blogs.technet.com/elenat/archive/2008/05/13/designing-an-infopath-form-that-can-store-data-in-a-database-part3.aspx

chandrakanth --

This is good information, but I think that what I need is a way to pre-populate some fields in an infopath form using values from a database and then send it to the user.

I found a solution that works for my needs. This is in C# 3.5:

I created a gridview that lists all of the employees.

In the gridview is a button, that fires the rowcommand:

protected void grdEmployees_RowCommand(object sender, GridViewCommandEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.CommandName == "Sort" || e.CommandName == "Page") //if you are sorting or paging, then ignore the call in this method.
            return;
       //retrieve some of the data from the selected row

        GridViewRow gridViewRow = grdEmployees.Rows[(Convert.ToInt32(e.CommandArgument))];
        string firstName = gridViewRow.Cells[1].Text;
        string lastName = gridViewRow.Cells[2].Text;
        string jobTitle = gridViewRow.Cells[3].Text;

        //open up the infopath form
        var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument {PreserveWhitespace = true}; //this is important, you need to preserve the white space of the original infopath form or else the xmldocument will add whitespace and corrupt the file
        xmlDocument.Load(@"C:\InfoPathForm.xml");
        var xmlNamespaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDocument.NameTable);
        xmlNamespaceManager.AddNamespace("my", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/myXSD/2008-06-24T18:21:03"); //add the prefix for the "my:" namespace

        //set values
        xmlDocument.SelectSingleNode("/my:myFields/my:SubjectName", xmlNamespaceManager).InnerText = firstName + " " + lastName; //pre-populate some values from the grid into the form

        string fileName = firstName + " " + lastName;
        fileName = fileName.Replace(" ", "_") + ".xml";
        //set the response
        var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        var xmlDeclaration = (XmlDeclaration) xmlDocument.FirstChild;
        xmlDeclaration.Encoding = "UTF-8";  //this is important, make sure that the encoding is UTF8
        xmlDocument.Save(new StringWriter(stringBuilder));
        Response.ClearHeaders();
        Response.Clear();
        Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename="+fileName); //this line will force the user to save the file (instead of saving it on the browser)
        Response.ContentType = "application/xml";
        Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

        //prep anything that infopath will have problems parsing
        string xmlFile = stringBuilder.ToString();
        xmlFile = xmlFile.Replace("encoding=\"utf-16\"?>", "encoding=\"utf-8\"?>");//this line is important, if you dont specify UTF8 encoding infopath will not open the document
       
        //deliver the file
        Response.Write(xmlFile);
        Response.End();
    }