Wednesday, January 24, 2007 9:48 PM Jan Tielens

Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Every once in a while you bump into a new feature in the 2007 Microsoft Office System and you think "hey! this is really cool!". This happened to me last week when I was playing around with InfoPath 2007. To be able to share with you my little aha erlibnis (credit for this term goes to my former math teacher), let's assume you've got following InfoPath form: the U2U Course Order form. A very basic form with Customer, Email, Course and Date fields, and a repeating table with student name and email fields.

You probably know that if you publish an InfoPath form to a SharePoint document library (or content type), the Publishing Wizard will ask you which columns you would like to make available in the SharePoint document library. InfoPath will allow you to pick a field from your InfoPath form which will become a column in the document library, so the data of the filled out InfoPath form will be replicated in the document library automatically.

Let's select for example the Customer field, from the InfoPath fields list; the Column name will be filled out automatically. The new cool InfoPath/SharePoint 2007 feature is displayed at the bottom of the dialog window: "Allow users to edit data in this field by using a datasheet or properties page". If you select this checkbox, users will be able to edit the value of the Customer column in the SharePoint properties page (so without opening InfoPath), and that updated value will be stored in the InfoPath file! It's magic! :-) I repeated this step for Email and Course fields, and finished the Publishing Wizard. Then I filled out the InfoPath form in the InfoPath client application:

The filled out data is of course replicated in the columns of the SharePoint document library. Now let's click Edit Properties in the document's dropdown menu (aka ECB). 

Because I selected that the Customer, Email and Course fields could be edited in the properties page, you can change them and the values in the filled out InfoPath form (the XML file) are updated too!

 

 

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Comments

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:23 AM by David Taylor

Yeah - Cool to know that Jan.

Works just like the integration with Office 2007 documents.

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Friday, January 26, 2007 8:10 AM by Thomas

Cool. Eh... what about validation? I assume this will not be applied when editing the field in SharePoint?

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 5:48 AM by Robin

@Thomas,

you are correct, in fact it is is also the warning you receive when you enable this in Infopath

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Monday, June 11, 2007 4:25 AM by Tashina

Yes it is a nice feature, but we are facing a problem as follows.

Suppose we have an InfoPath form with 3 fields and is published to a Form Library with property editing enabled.

<Employee>

<Name></Name>

<Designation></ Designation >

<Manager></Manager>

</ Employee >

When this form is opened using “Edit Properties” link, SharePoint displays these fields in a List view. On click of “OK” button, the modified contents will again be stored into their respective XML tags.

When the template is modified and re-published with a new field (with property editing enabled), the properties page displays all the 4 fields for all documents (new documents as well as old documents).

<Employee>

<Name></Name>

<Designation></ Designation >

<Manager></Manager>

<Department></Department>

</ Employee >

When an old document (created before re-publishing) is opened for editing in properties page, SharePoint displays all the 4 fields in its List with the 4th field empty (as no data is available for this field for old documents). When user enters something and clicks on “OK” button, SharePoint tries to saves this information back into XML file. When it tries to save the 4th field, it will not find a place for it in old XML files (which has only 3 fields) and throws an error saying –

“Changes could not be saved into the document.

The property to change is read-only for the document's content type, or the document is missing XML elements or attributes where the changes would be saved. Try editing the document in a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible XML editor such as Microsoft Office InfoPath.”

Please let us know if you have any solutions for this.

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Friday, August 10, 2007 4:15 PM by Hadi

I would recommend directly editing the xml via notepad.

You can also use sharepoint designer to quickly edit the infopath xml files store on sharepoint.

It is pretty easy and actually, faster than opening an infopath form (but only a solution for technically advanced users).

# re: Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

Friday, August 31, 2007 3:55 AM by Ameen

What if i want to make the repeating table information to be avaliable in the document library.

I need that because i want to send the information from the repeating table to a web service. the problem is that i don't want to send them automatically once the form is submitted since it have to go under a sequence of approval and then to be submitted.

Thanks in advance

# InfoPath Field Value Modified from SharePoint Datasheet &laquo; SharePoint Knowledge Base

Thursday, November 13, 2008 2:46 PM by InfoPath Field Value Modified from SharePoint Datasheet « SharePoint Knowledge Base

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# Twitted by cosier

Friday, May 01, 2009 2:11 AM by Twitted by cosier

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