InfoPath Dev

I would like please to set the maximum capacity of a column to a certain number of characters. This column displays a content of a text control in an infopath form, and sometimes the text is so big that it makes the list look bad, so i want to show only part of the text by seting a maximum capacity.

I am tryign to make a history log that gets information from sharepoint and displays it in the following way: -- User1 xxx (submitted) the form on xx-xx-20xx -- User2 xxx (reviewed) the form on xx-xx-20xx I know I should use a multiline textbox. But I cannot figure out how to dynamically add the rows to it and how to get the data ( ...

I am loading a Sharepoint list to a Dropdown control through a data connection, it is working fine, but it takes about 5 minutes to load the form in the web because the list is very long ( about 1700 entries) Is there any way to do the same thing in a very fast way?