Online Forms with MOSS & InfoPath

Most online applications, that is Web-based apps, rely on HTML forms that

interact with the users to display and gather information from them. However,

storing this information requires at least some knowledge of software

development and skills to read and write from a database. But with the new

InfoPath 2007 application working with SharePoint 2007, anyone can create and

publish forms for others to  use that can gather and store information to

be collated later. This article introduces you to the concepts and the way to

actually implement this.

InfoPath 2007 is the latest version of the XML-based forms designer and

viewer application, which is part of MS Office. InfoPath allows you to create

very dynamic forms that users can open and enter and edit information in. This

version has a number of features that make it even easier to use and we shall

look at some of them a little further on.

MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the new version of what used to be known

as SharePoint Portal Server. This has a very large number of new features, some

of which we have covered in the past. One of the new features is the Forms

Service. This 'component' of SharePoint lets you us. InfoPath to create forms

and use SharePoint to host and render the forms when requested. Unlike the

earlier versions of InfoPath, once the form is hosted within SharePoint, end

users do not require InfoPath installed on their machines to be able to interact

with the forms. SharePoint manages the rendering of the entire form within the

browser itself.

The first thing to do is set up SharePoint to accept InfoPath forms. Do note

that if you only need the forms service functionality, you do not need the full

SharePoint product. Instead you can install the Office Forms Server product

instead. In either case, you will need to configure the forms service. In MOSS,

open the Central Administration site and go to the 'Application Management' tab.

Here scroll down to the 'InfoPath Forms Service' section and enter the

'Configure InfoPath Forms Service' link. This page lets you change the settings

of the forms service. Here you can turn on the options to both allow users to

create browser-enabled forms and allow the service to actually render them in

the browser. Without these settings, the forms service will not host the forms

for you nor will it render the form within a browser. Once these settings are

done, you should go to the site where you wish to host the forms. Here you need

to create a new Document Library that stores the form templates as well as the

one that stores the form inputs.

MOSS Central Administration for Forms service. These two options allow browser compatibility	Here you can create a new 'Forms Library' that hosts InfoPath form templates

Go to Documents and click on Create. In the list that appears, select 'Form

Library'. Create a new library by entering the name here. Once the library has

been created, you are ready to create a form to be hosted on it. For this, open

InfoPath from any machine on the same network. Select 'Design a Form Template'

and then 'Blank Form' from the templates list. But before you press OK, make

sure that the option 'Enable browser-compatible features only' is turned on.

Design the form by dragging and dropping elements such as tables, textboxes etc.

and typing directly into the form design area. Once the form looks the way you

want, save it locally as a form template with an XSN extension. To get it into

SharePoint, you need to Publish it. You also need to allow the submit action to

let users submit forms. For this, go to Tools>Submit Options... and turn the

'Allows users to submit the form' on. In the destination, select SharePoint

Document Library and click on Add. Enter the URL for the form library you

created earlier, and give either a static name or a dynamically generated name

for the form submit action. Save the submit action.

When designing a new template, make sure the 'enable browser compatible features only' option is checked in	A simple form using tables and textboxes in design mode in InfoPath 2007

Go to File>Publish to open the publishing wizard. In the first step, select

'To a SharePoint server...' and click on Next. Now you need to point to the

SharePoint site that the form is going to be published to. When prompted, enter

authentication information to allow writing to the site. In the next step,

ensure that the 'Enable this form to be filled out by using a browser' option is

turned on and you are publishing to a Document library. Click on Next to

continue. The next step allows you to select where the form is going to reside.

Select the form library you created earlier. You can now select the columns you

wish to show as data within the library view itself. Once this is done, you can

publish the form to SharePoint. When the wizard completes, you can open the

document library or the form itself within the browser.

Forms can have much more advanced features too. For instance, you can add

data validation rules such as required fields, data pattern matching (like

numbers in amount field, e-mail address, etc.) and others. One of the nice

things you can do is pull in data from other SharePoint lists to show in

drop-down controls on the forms. For this, change any textbox field in your form

to a Dropdown Listbox. Once changed, open its properties dialog and in the

Listbox entries section, select 'Look up values from an external data source'.

In the wizard, select 'Create a new connection to: Receive data' and in the next

step select 'SharePoint library or list'. Go back to the SharePoint site and

create a new Custom list. Enter few values here that need to get populated. Now

back in the InfoPath wizard, enter the URL to this list and when prompted,

select the column to show in the dropdown. Use the treeview for the 'entries'

section to select the field for display (and optionally value if different from

the display field). Save and Publish the form to allow users to use the

validations and populated data fields in the form.

Select the fields on the form you wish to show as columns in the library view	Here give the name of the document library and a dynamic file name for each submit
The forms library looks like this with two forms submitted. Note the column names in the library	You can quickly change any control to another type while working with the form

InfoPath and MOSS 2007 allow non-developers also to create rich and dynamic

forms that can be used to gather data within your organization. The new forms

service enables browser based rendering, so that all end users do not require

InfoPath installed on their machines. This is a great way to IT enable processes

or data stores that otherwise was done in less organized manners.