Infopath Best Practice

Infopath Deployment Best Practice

infopath limitation

It is very important to understand the limitation of infopath 2007. From high level, web based infopath is very powerful but it comes with several limitations.

1. No native write to SQL databases. The ease of use of establing an ADO connection to SQL or Access, and being able to query and write back to a database is lost. Instead you will probably need to talk to the DB via a web service.
   
2. No roundtripping for cascading picklists. Something I do all the time is have one picklist be a filter for another picklist. Common example, pick a state, which then filters the city field dropdown. Can't do that in a web form.
3. Summary list of controls that aren't supported in web forms:
   ComboBox,Multiple-Selection List Box
   Master/Detail,Bulleted, Numbered and Plain List
   Picture ,Ink Picture ,Vertical Label
   Scrolling and Horizontal Region ,Horizontal Repeating Table
   Choice Group ,Repeating Choice Group
   Choice Section ,Repeating Recursive Section
   ActiveX Controls

Refer to this article for more details, MSDN article.

With this limitation, this shows you how to perform debugging.

programming in infopath + print view

Interesting article to describe how to perform coding in infopath to send email and close the form.

And it might be useful to talk about the print view. Very often after we submit the form, we need to print it. print view become handy when you have different form view for input and printout. Refer to this article for more details

More example

how to host infopath in asp.net web form

I come across on some articles to describe how to host infopath in asp.net web form, which is using xmlFormView control.

And this article describe how to generate pdf from it using custom asp.net web form but it will lose the capability to dynamically update the column to sharepoint list.

How to deal with infopath object

Good article to share. Highlight

string xpath = "/my:myFields/my:field1";
XPathNavigator field1 = MainDataSource.CreateNavigator().SelectSingleNode(xpath, NamespaceManager);
string oldValue = field1.Value; // Read
field1.SetValue(“New Value”); // Write

Auto Generating file name for infopath post

For those who has infopath experience will find it very ignoring that you need to provide the file name for the submitted infopath form.

To achieve this we can use timestamp as the fileName, but this will create another entry when you edit the form.

Refer to this on how to do it.

Infopath VS web form

With the popularity of infopath, we come to a cross-junction to ask why infopath and not web form. This article highlights the key difference between these.

One key advantage of infopath is the turnaround time, with it, System Integrator can build the infopath form from scratch and subsequently user can add new column / remove existing column from the form without any technical knowledge required.

The drawback is that Infopath license is required.