InfoPath
With the introduction of the Office Open XML Formats in the 2007 release, the process for programmatically using XSLT to generate Word 2007 documents has changed somewhat since the Office 2003 days. For those of you not interested in working with XSLT, this post describes an alternative for programmatically generating Word 2007 documents from InfoPath 2007 forms...
posted @ Friday, August 08, 2008 3:20 PM | Feedback (14)
I was recently building an internal InfoPath 2007 solution and came across an old nemesis: the dreaded "NaN" issue. In this particular case, the NaN value appeared in a calculated field that was bound to an expression box...
posted @ Thursday, April 24, 2008 9:52 AM | Feedback (0)
Digital signatures can be used in Office InfoPath 2007 browser forms to sign sections of data. However, the certificate that you use must be installed on both the client and SharePoint server machines...
posted @ Monday, March 24, 2008 4:50 PM | Feedback (0)
The XmlFormView is a common way to display Office InfoPath 2007 browser forms on a custom ASPX page. One thing to keep in mind though is that the InfoPath form template that is to be displayed in the XmlFormView control must reside in the same site collection as the custom ASPX page...
posted @ Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:47 AM | Feedback (2)
If you want to display auxiliary information within your InfoPath form solutions, using custom task panes is a viable option. I recently developed a form template that identified different hardware types in a repeating table control. The unique identifier for each hardware type was the model number. In this particular solution, the customer wanted hardware spec information for a particular model to be displayed in the task pane...
posted @ Wednesday, January 23, 2008 12:52 PM | Feedback (2)
After reading my four-part series about the time-off request solution, someone asked if it were possible to retrieve user information into the form and thus save the end user from having to select an employee name from a drop-down list box control. Immediately, I thought of the declarative userName function in InfoPath 2007. Unfortunately, as I later found out from the InfoPath product team, this function is not supported in the Document Information Panel...
posted @ Wednesday, October 03, 2007 3:19 PM | Feedback (2)
This is the third installment in a four-part series about the time-off request solution, an end-to-end Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution that uses Microsoft Office Word 2007 as a form application. In the previous post I built an Office Word 2007 document template using content controls and associated it with the Time-Off Request site content type. This post focuses on the document information panel and its ability to drive business logic in the form without any custom code...
posted @ Thursday, June 07, 2007 8:33 AM | Feedback (12)
When designing Microsoft Office InfoPath form templates, filtering can be used to limit the options that are displayed to users in certain controls. However, if you are designing an Office InfoPath 2007 form template for a browser scenario, it should be noted that filtering is not supported. In this post, I offer a workaround for the unsupported filtering feature...
posted @ Tuesday, January 16, 2007 5:39 PM | Feedback (2)
A number of good questions have been raised about the building permit application solution that we built. One question in particular that I see frequently relates to the SharePoint columns that were promoted from the InfoPath form template. How did we enable some of those columns to be editable so that they could be modified by a SharePoint Designer workflow? The answer to the question is actually quite simple...
posted @ Friday, October 27, 2006 10:32 AM | Feedback (3)
A few months ago I wrote about how a Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow can be used to update SharePoint list items. In that post the workflow logic that was described was attached to a specific document library, and the Update List Item action was used to set field values for files in that library. I have since found out that Office SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow functionality can extend to other SharePoint lists...
posted @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 10:39 AM | Feedback (27)
The 2007 Microsoft Office release has built-in support for running InfoPath forms in a mobile Web browser. Granted, there are limitations to the form behavior. For instance, all formatting and layout in views are ignored, and controls such as the rich text box, option button, and section are not supported. Still, the fact that InfoPath form data can be submitted from mobile devices opens up a broad range of user scenarios...
posted @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006 2:16 PM | Feedback (5)
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 supports parameters for browser forms. This functionality can make form solutions more dynamic and requires only a small amount of code. Within the Loading event of the form template, the TryGetValue method is needed for each parameter value that is being passed. Then, the appropriate fields in the form file can be set accordingly...
posted @ Monday, July 24, 2006 11:35 AM | Feedback (6)
The much-hyped building permit application solution, which was featured in John Peltonen's Tech•Ed 2006 demo and will be presented as an instructor-led lab later this month at TechReady3, includes a feature that has not been discussed in great length but has been sought after by developers for a long time. The feature, having a Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 form hosted in a custom Web page, is used at the beginning of the demo—when the applicant first provides building project information...
posted @ Friday, July 14, 2006 10:22 AM | Feedback (0)
This is the fifth installment in a series about the building permit application, an end-to-end solution built entirely with the 2007 Microsoft Office release. The previous post described how routing logic was developed with SharePoint Designer. This post focuses on the creation of an archival policy...
posted @ Friday, June 30, 2006 9:17 AM | Feedback (1)
This is the fourth installment in a series about the building permit application, an end-to-end solution built entirely with the 2007 Microsoft Office release. The previous post identified the new InfoPath e-mail attachment options. This post focuses on workflow logic…
posted @ Tuesday, June 27, 2006 12:44 PM | Feedback (10)
This is the third installment in a series about the building permit application, an end-to-end solution built entirely with the 2007 Microsoft Office release. The previous post described the implementation of user role functionality. This post focuses on InfoPath e-mail attachments…
posted @ Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:46 PM | Feedback (0)
This is the second installment in a series about the building permit application, an end-to-end solution built entirely with the 2007 Microsoft Office release. The last post provided an overview of the solution and explained the "design once" concept of Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. This post focuses on how user roles are implemented in the solution…
posted @ Friday, June 16, 2006 10:38 AM | Feedback (3)
Recently, I have touted how the 2007 Microsoft Office release simplifies the overall development effort for end-to-end solutions. Currently, I have been developing different variations of a building permit application solution, for which I promised in my last post to share some details. In this post, I will provide an overview of that solution and highlight one key feature: the "design once" concept of Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007…
posted @ Monday, June 12, 2006 12:01 PM | Feedback (10)
Last month, I wrote about transforming InfoPath form files that contain ink picture controls into Word 2003 documents. That task involved getting the ink picture data and associated background image from the form file into WordML. This month, the task at hand was the transformation of form files with a variable number of images into WordML. This type of transformation is similar to the one regarding the ink picture, except that the number of images to be transformed at runtime is unknown...
posted @ Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:21 PM | Feedback (6)
On a current project I was tasked with using XSLT to transform InfoPath form files into Word 2003 documents. The InfoPath form template used to create the XML input was designed for a tablet PC and thus had an ink picture control, the data for which needed to appear in the corresponding Word document. To complicate matters, the ink picture in the form template used a background image, which also needed to be output in Word...
posted @ Friday, October 21, 2005 10:46 AM | Feedback (2)
NOTE: This post is actually a repeat of one that was authored last June. Unfortunately, that post resides on another blog server that is no longer public. So, in response to a recent question about transforming InfoPath rich text into Word, I have decided to re-post. Amazingly, the content is still valid, even though Microsoft has since released its XSLT Inference Tool...
posted @ Friday, August 12, 2005 1:41 PM | Feedback (17)
Recently, we were tasked with building a budget solution prototype that uses Access with InfoPath. Within the InfoPath form, users could update multiple tables with a single action, and it became necessary for us to create custom calls to the database with managed code. As it turns out, using managed code to submit data from InfoPath to Access is not as arduous as it sounds...
posted @ Thursday, May 05, 2005 4:55 PM | Feedback (8)
You can work with ADO.NET DataSet objects to retrieve and submit data in InfoPath SP1. Note, however, that there are limitations when working with a DataSet.
posted @ Wednesday, October 13, 2004 8:58 AM | Feedback (0)