Online Forms with MOSS & InfoPath

The new InfoPath works great with SharePoint to deliver online forms for gathering information. You do not even need to know any coding to be able to create and post your forms

Monday, May 14, 2007

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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.

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