Drewby

Laura John points out a schedule of upcoming InfoPath and Office webcasts for developers as well as a list of InfoPath resources on the web.

Today, the hype is all around social software, new more fluid approaches to workflow, and collaboration. Making ourselves as groups and organizations more efficient. The information workers, as we call them now, are not islands. They are linked with each other in vast human communication networks. How are we doing it? By simplifying the interfaces we have with each other to increase the number and effectiveness of our links. I see some similarities between this approach to human collaboration an

A couple days ago, I wrote about the ability to create a Custom Task Pane in InfoPath. You can use a similar technique to show modal dialogs based on an HTML file. In this post, I give a brief overview of how to create and launch a modal dialog in InfoPath.

I created a little experiment to serve InfoPath documents dynamically from ASP.NET. Once a record was opened, I wanted the form to already be populated with values from a database rather then having two views (Query and Data Entry). I ran into a few snags while trying to get this to work and thought I'd throw up here to show how I got around them and see if there are any other solutions floating around.

In InfoPath, every control on the form must be bound to an element in the XML document and defined by the underlying schema. This can be limiting when you want to provide some additional assistance to retrieve information and/or populate the form.

One option is to use managed code that displays System.Windows.Forms dialogs launched by a button on the form. This comes at a cost of making development and deployment more complicated.

Another option is to use a Custom Task Pane. A Custom Task Pane in InfoPath is simply an HTML file that is displayed in the Task Pane on the right side of the form. The HTML file can have form controls that are not bound to elements in the XML document. The HTML can also have inline script and the script can call back into the InfoPath object model, including all your functions in the Form code-behind script. So, you don't have to worry about making web service calls from HTML script; you can use InfoPath query adapters.

This page in the InfoPath SDK explains how to use the Custom Task Pane.