InfoPath

SharePoint Connections Session Code

David Gerhardt — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:03:45 GMT

Thanks to all who attended my sessions last week at SharePoint Connections. I was especially pleased with the attendance of my last session (Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint). Asking people to get up for a session at 8am on the last day of a conference in Las Vegas can be a challenge, but the turnout was still high, and there was no shortage of good questions.

As I promised, the code from my two InfoPath sessions is available for download here. I could not include the form templates used for the demos, as they are owned by a third party, but the code snippets are there and can be included in your Visual Studio solutions. You will just need to modify the code to fit your form data source.

Integrating Lotus Notes with the 2007 Release

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:58:08 GMT

Last year we worked with Gary Devendorf to create a two-day training course about 2007 Microsoft Office system interoperability with Lotus Notes 7. The course was geared toward Notes developers and had sessions about Visual Studio 2005 and Domino Web services, ASP.NET, the Open XML Formats, InfoPath, Access, and Excel, to name a few.

For the next month or so we will be working with Gary again to upgrade the materials. The new training course will still use Lotus Notes 7, but we will convert the Visual Studio 2005 projects to Visual Studio 2008 and add new content for subjects such as the Business Data Catalog, InfoPath Forms Services, custom workflows, and mobile development activities. Gary will be providing training updates on his blog. For more interoperability information, check out the InteropTips Community Site for developers of .NET and Lotus Notes applications.

SharePoint Connections Fall 2008

David Gerhardt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:42:33 GMT

The fall event for SharePoint Connections 2008 is a little more than a month away from now (November 10–13 in Las Vegas). Once again, I am lucky enough to be one of the speakers, and my sessions are as follows:

Developing InfoPath Client-Only Forms for SharePoint — This session explores many of the form designer capabilities for InfoPath client-only solutions.
Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint — This session explains some of the limitations in working with InfoPath Forms Services and discusses ways to optimize browser forms using out-of-the-box and managed code techniques.
Adding Codeless Workflows to InfoPath Form Solutions — This session identifies how you can integrate codeless workflows into SharePoint form solutions.

It should be a great event, and I look forward to meeting many of you there.

Converting an InfoPath 2007 Form into a Word 2007 Document

David Gerhardt — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:20:11 GMT

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...

Deploying InfoPath Templates to a Production Environment

David Gerhardt — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:22:44 GMT

Microsoft just published another one of my technical articles: Best Practices for Deploying InfoPath 2007 Form Templates to a Production Environment. This article shows some best practices for moving form templates from a development environment to a production environment and includes steps for adding a debug view. The article also describes some techniques for optimizing browser form scenarios.

Working Around the NaN Issue

David Gerhardt — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:52:31 GMT

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...

Supporting Digital Signatures in Browser Forms

David Gerhardt — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:50:30 GMT

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...

Invalid URL when Publishing a Form Template

David Gerhardt — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:19:00 GMT

If you have ever deployed an Office InfoPath 2007 form template, you may have come across the following issue in the Publishing Wizard:

Several people have already blogged about this issue and potential resolutions. In the Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta 2) days, Firedancer described how you can stop the System Event Notification service. Dave Hunter provided the same advice in this post while also explaining that a site collection must be at the root level of the SharePoint site to which you are publishing. Other posts and forums have offered similar suggestions.

Another possibility, although probably not as common as the aforementioned resolutions, is that URLScan is running on the IIS Web site. URLScan is a security tool that restricts the types of HTTP requests that IIS will process. Settings are stored in URLScan.ini, located in <DRIVE>:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\urlscan\. By default, the OPTIONS verb is included in the DenyVerbs section. If the UseAllowVerbs option is set to 0 (which means URLScan will use the DenyVerbs section instead of the AllowVerbs section), and the OPTIONS verb has not been removed from the DenyVerbs section, then you might encounter the invalid URL issue.

To determine if URLScan is even running on your server, start IIS, right-click Web Sites, and then click Properties. In the Web Sites Properties dialog box, click the ISAPI Filters tab to see if the URLScan filter is loaded.

Submitting Forms with Microsoft.SharePoint

David Gerhardt — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Occasionally, our InfoPath Forms Services solutions require a direct submission to a SharePoint list using a Web service. In order to use SPSite, SPWeb, SPFolder, SPFile, and other classes, your Web service will need a reference to the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace, which provides the types and members for working with SharePoint sites. But where is the corresponding Microsoft.SharePoint.dll?

We get this question a lot, and it has also made its way into numerous SharePoint development forums. For Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions, the DLL can be found in <DRIVE>:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\ on the SharePoint server.

NOTE: You can create a development environment separate from the SharePoint server that includes a reference to the DLL and allows you to compile the Web service code. However, the Web service can run only on the SharePoint server machine.

Using the XmlFormView Control

David Gerhardt — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:47:00 GMT

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...