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This has bothered me for a while, but never bothered me enough to make me figure out how to do it. Until now.
The problem
You've created a Form Library in your Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal server site/area and you want to provide users a link to fill out the form without bringing them to the form library or providing that obnoxious list web part toolbar.
Potential Solutions
One solution has been to deploy the InfoPath form via MSI. I don't link this option because versioning the form isn't as slick.
Another solution has been to reverse engineer the JScript code that SharePoint uses behind the scenes in the A HREF=Javascript: call for the "Fill Out This Form" toolbar element. The downside to this is that it causes an Internet Explorer security prompt, and unless you have the code snippet you can waste a lot of time reverse engineering ows.js and its siblings. I spent some time doing this, and you could write a web part to get around the security prompt, but if you are looking for a no prompt no code solution, here it is: strip down the data view web part.
Solution
Use FrontPage 2003 to edit the page on which you want your hyperlink to appear. Add the form library web part to the page. Right click on it and convert it to an XSL data view. Delete everything but the "Fill Out This Form" toolbar element (including the classes because they will cause the style sheets to apply the toolbar style to the element). Then change the wording of the hyperlink to suit your needs. This approach is useful because I don't have to copy script references or look up guids.
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Introduction
The Information Bridge Framework (IBF) is significant. It masquerades as a structured way to finally get meaning out of the Office SmartTag mechanism, which it does. What it really is is the first prescriptive guidance and toolset Microsoft to begin implementing a Service Oriented Architecture. Although you do not have to use web services as part of the IBF, it does require that all of your entities and actions be described as structured schemas. By implementing an IBF solution, if you have not already described your business entities or actions with XSD schemas, you will have created them as a side effect. Describing one's business entities in schemas is a non-trivial exercise and incites the need for alignment on vocabulary within your organization. However, coming to alignment on key business entities and the actions that are performed around those entities is a gating step that must be accomplished in order to move towards the highly efficient agile world described to us in the vision of an ideal service oriented architecture. An IBF solution not only requires this but also has prescriptive guidance and tools to build actual solutions with those schemas and provides a metadata repository to centrally store and manage those schemas.
Even if SmartTags and Task Panes don't strike you as the most compelling interface for a Services Oriented Architecture, there isn't anything that is stopping you from reusing the web services you produce for an IBF solution for say an InfoPath form, a SharePoint DataView web part, or even enterprise application integration (EAI) scenarios.
Building a Simple IBF Solution
Aggregating business entities and their actions in a consistent manner is difficult. Enabling automated scenarios on top of that is overwhelming. The IBF does a good job of enabling this, but it is still technically and lexically complicated. After scouring MSDN and search results for a good deep technical introduction to the Information Bridge Framework, I found and went through Vijay Desai's 5 part series, which I am recommending:
- Building a Simple IBF solution - For Beginners, Part 1
- Building a Simple IBF solution - For Beginners, Part 2
- Building a Simple IBF solution - For Beginners Part 3
This article presents a description of the the steps involved in adding metadata that describes the User Experience for IBF application. - Building a Simple IBF solution - For Beginners, Part 4
This article focuses on the creation of operations that are a part of an Action element in the Metadata and is a continuation of the STEP4 in the creation of an IBF solution. - Building a Simple IBF solution - For Beginners, Part 5
This is the final article in the series of articles on "Building a simple IBF application - For Beginners". Here I wrap up this series of articles on demystifying IBF solution development by discussing the creation of smart document and developing the UI to render the results returned by our IBF compliant Web Service.