InfoPath Dev

HI there, Need a little more detail on why your dropdown contains blanks.  Could you elaborate on what you mean by dropdowns are looking at the dropdown with the most data?  Is your dropdown connected to just one SP list or more? Perhaps if you can include a screenshot that would be great.

You can use the userName() function to get the current user.  Or if you require more information about the user, you can look into using the User Profile Web Service.

You can have 2 controls bound to the same field in the data source.  For example, if you right click a control and click Change Binding, you can select a field that is already bound to another control that is on the form.  This means that the both controls display the same set of data.

You can create a separate view that will be used specifically after submit that contains all the text boxes that don't have the border.  Just be sure to set the display view to show after the form is submitted.

Depending on your scenario, you could force a postback.  Mark the control that sets the field to always postback in the browser forms tab.  Or if you are setting via a rule, I think there is an Update Form action that you can execute.

You could try using a horizontal repeating control, however, this is only available in filler forms.

There is likely some focus issue that is occurring here.  It's difficult to debug these sort of things in a generic fashion, but I can offer some ideas that hopefully one of which may work for you.For each option button, go into the properties and set the browser form tab to Never.  This will remove postbacks.For each control, set ...

qRules has commands which allow you to leverage the managed metadata service: http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/qRules_new.aspx But out of the box, there is very limited interaction between InfoPath and metadata columns. 

I don't believe there is an easy way to do this.  I think you're stuck with changing them manually :(  Sorry couldn't be more help.

That's an interesting scenario.  InfoPath doesn't do a great job of replacing entire terms like VariableA or VariableB with another term.  You could set up your formula so that it displays like concat("some text here", VariableA, " and some more text ", VariableB).  Then the variables are text fields ...