Contents tagged with InfoPath

  • Nifty InfoPath 2007/SharePoint 2007 Feature

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    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.

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  • External Data & InfoPath: Server Upgrade and Migration Tool

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    Getting external data into an InfoPath form is extremely easy and creating rich electronic forms is easy as well, so lots of power users and developers are using InfoPath to capture structured data. Publishing those forms is also very easy: in the InfoPath client, just click the Publish menu item and go through the wizard. Et voila, the form is ready to be filled out in a SharePoint document library by the end users. The fun starts when those power users or developers are not allowed to deploy directly to the production SharePoint servers: probably the locations of the external data is different on your development/test server than on the production machine (especially if you automatically submit data). In InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) this can be solved by using Universal Data Connection (UDC) files. The InfoPath knows where to find the UDC file (relatively to the location of the form) and the UDC file tells InfoPath where to data is located. So the location of the data is not stored anymore in InfoPath, but it's stored in the UDC file. The result: you can change the location without having to change the InfoPath form.

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  • Building Workflow Solutions Article … Where’s the Code?

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    In the current issue of .NET Magazine an article written by Patrick and me has been published, titled “Bouwen van Workflow-toepassingen” (Building Workflow Solutions). At this point the article is only available in Dutch, but I’m working on an English translation. Anyway, I was showing off the article to my wife as it appeared to me that in the article wasn’t a single line of code! No big deal you might think, but the article goes through all the steps needed to build a workflow solution based on the following products:

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  • Overview of Office 2003 Developer Tools and Programs

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    Did you ever wonder what technology you should use to create your Office smart client application? Today we have a lot of technologies and tools to choose from (I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing ;-): InfoPath, Visual Studio.NET, VSTO 2003/2005, IBF, Access Developer Extensions, Smart Documents, Smart Tags, ... Today an article was published on MSDN that tries to give an overview of these technologies and has some guidelines which technology to use, you can read it here.

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  • Creating InfoPath Processing Instructions in BizTalk Server 2004

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    InfoPath has a little bit of magic in it. I’m not talking about the cool features for creating and using rich XML based forms, but I mean the magic that happens when you save the contents of an InfoPath form in a XML file. Although the result is just a file with the XML extension, it seems even the Windows Explorer is enchanted, it displays an InfoPath icon for the XML file. When double click the file, InfoPath will be opened, the corresponding InfoPath form will be loaded and the data from the XML file is showed in the form.

    So what’s causing of all this wizardry? If you open the XML file with Visual Studio.NET for example so we can see the actual XML content, you can see that are some XML directives (starting with ?mso) that you wouldn’t expect:

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