The ASPSmith's Blog

Some rants about ASP.NET by Steven Smith

InfoPath Tidbit

InfoPath forms can only be viewed and filled out by folks who have InfoPath installed... or can they?  As it turns out, InfoPath .xdr files are really just CAB files.  This means you can use the 'expand' utility (in Windows 2000 and later, I believe) to pull out the pieces of the XDR file, one of which contains a definition of the form (actually, one .xsl file per form).  With a little search-and-replace or perhaps another XSL transform, it would not be too terribly hard to convert the input controls used by InfoPath into, say, web controls, allowing the forms to be displayed via ASP.NET.

Unfortunately, that would be the closest you could get InfoPath to .NET.  Although it can consume web services and is an all around very cool tool, it uses VBScript/JScript and ADO for all of its programmability.  You'd think 3 years after .NET hit the scene (publicly) that a brand new application would at least support the CLR, but noooooo.

Comments

JosephCooney said:

I thought the Schema file was one of the newer XSD schemas, not the microsoft-specific and now deprecated XDR. XSD.exe in the .net framework can convert between the two, so that opens some possibilites (typed datasets, classes etc). Tim Walters weblog has some interesting infopath info http://weblogs.asp.net/twalters/posts/4013.aspx . I had seen the Authentic5 tool from Altova, but never really bothered finding out more about it. It seems that it is quite similar to Infopath (XML document editing and validation against a schema) but the thick client viewer is free, it is not beta, and it has thin-client DHTML viewer, activex control viewer, and ASP.NET server control.

The whole "GUI from XML Schema" idea greatly interests me. A guy called Marc Clifton has written some related articles over at code project. He's written a nice-looking XSD editor, and a winforms app that creates a GUI for editing an XML document that conforms to a particular schema. I think there is a lot of scope for generating GUIs in ASP.NET from schemas.

I don't really understand why Microsoft chose VBScript/JScript for infopath programming. My suspicion (and I have absolutely nothing to back this up at this point) it that the infopath viewer is just IE rendering the result of an XSL transform applied to the Schema/Data document in the infopath document. Wow, what a long rant.
# August 8, 2003 2:28 AM

Patrick said:

Hi,

Can anyone tell me how i can use JScript to invoke a web service that returns and XML datafile or node?

regards,
Patrick
# October 24, 2003 11:06 AM

Eddie Geller said:

Hi,

InfoView converts Infopath forms to asp.net web forms.

Check it out here - http://www.uniqueworldsoftware.com/infoview

There is an online demo there too.

Thanks

Eddie
# June 1, 2004 3:24 AM
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