Two people doing their own thing.

Microsoft Certified Partner Soul Solutions
Aug 16

Written by: Soul Solutions
Wednesday, 16 August 2006

BronwenWeeGo.jpg So I've been using InfoPath as a development tool for a couple of months now.  So here's the top 5 things that annoy me about infopath 2003, or that i haven't found an easy answer for.

1. Regeneration of template/sampledata.xml - If you add new nodes into your form xsd file there's no easy way to get them added to your template.xml or your sampledata.xml.  The only sure way to ensure they're there is to add them manually which of course if very tedioius.

2. No common rule definiton -if you use the same rule on more than 1 control on the infopath form, you have to create it from scratch (unless you know how to hack the manifest file).

3. No Common Controls - If you use the same combination of controls (e.g. Suburb ddl, state ddl and postcode text box) in a lot of places, no easy way just to make it a common control.

4. No section footers -   As it's very Word like, you'd expect it to behave like Word.  There's no way to have a page header/footer on a section, only for the whole of the document.

5. No batch publishing - Doesn't seem to be an easy way to publish a bunch of forms to  a web server in a batch (or using a batch file to publish)

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3 comments so far...

Re: Top 5 "features" of Infopath 2003 that annoy me

Hey there! My name is Alex Weinstein, I'm a Program manager on the Office InfoPath team. Thanks for griping! Feedback makes us better.

Some replies to your comments:

1. Try Tools | Convert Main Data Source in response to schema changes in the external XML file that you want to pick up.

2 and 3 - Very fair request; in fact, we've addressed it with the Template Parts feature in InfoPath 2007. Do take a look!

4. Fair. Very fair. Still annoying in InfoPath 2007. Thanks for the feedback; we'll definitely consider it for vNext.

5. We partially addressed this in InfoPath 2007, if you want to publish a bunch of forms to a SharePoint server, you can use the STSAdmin tool to admin-deploy a bunch of templates. Watch the InfoPath Team Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath), we'll have an article on this in the next few weeks.

Thanks!
- Alex

By Alex Weinstein on   Thursday, 19 October 2006

Re: Top 5 "features" of Infopath 2003 that annoy me

Just found something for #5 for InfoPath 2003 - complicated, but possible:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_ip2003_ta/html/OfficeInfoPathXSNFixupDeployFormTemplateScript.asp

By Alex Weinstein on   Thursday, 19 October 2006

Re: Top 5 "features" of Infopath 2003 that annoy me

Thanks for that Alex, will pass the publishing on onto the team.
Unfortuantly the project is committed to 2003 :( and the section footer problem has caused us major issues.

By Bronwen (Soul Solutions) on   Friday, 20 October 2006

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