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9
Electronic Forms
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
➤

Designing InfoPath Forms

➤

New features in InfoPath and InfoPath Forms Services 2010

➤

InfoPath Best Practices

➤

Sandboxing Your InfoPath Forms

➤

Form Development Tools

In today’s world, most business processes rely on capturing information from the end users
and translating it into appropriate and timely actions. A majority of these business processes
simply start with a form and may use other forms throughout their lifecycle. Unfortunately,
in many cases forms are received with inaccurate information, which leads to bad decision
making, significant cost, and damage to organizations.
SharePoint ships with a great object model that can be used to build sophisticated forms for

gathering data and feeding it to the enterprise business processes, such as workflow sequences
and composite applications. The vision behind the product, as an application development
platform, however, has always been based on its ability to build powerful enterprise
applications quickly and easily. The emphasis on the words easy and quickly in the product’s
vision statement means that there should be an easier way to create, distribute, and manage
electronic forms with little or no code.
InfoPath 2003 was Microsoft’s fi rst attempt to uniquely position this product to handle the
problems in business data collection and presentation needs. The main feature of InfoPath
2003 was the ability to author and render XML-based electronic forms with support for
custom-defi ned schema. InfoPath 2003 native support for XML made it a compelling solution
for integration with many backend systems that can understand and communicate in XML.
In SharePoint 2003, a form library and its form template were designed to glue the two

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CHAPTER 9 ELECTRONIC FORMS

products together. Collectively, the form library and its template allowed customers to create new
instances of a single form template and translate the field values into column values upon saving the
form, all done within the context of a SharePoint site but fi lled out via the InfoPath 2003 client.
Because of some architectural and deployment limitations in InfoPath 2003, this product never
achieved adoption beyond simple departmental solutions that allowed members of small teams to

collect, route, and store data within their own little collaborative sandboxes. But, how about the
Enterprise?
Not all users who interact with business processes have access to the InfoPath client application;
neither do they use one particular device, such as their computer, all the time! For example, sales
agents need to take the forms offline and use their PDAs and smart phones to fi ll them out, partners
use only their browser to interact with forms, and internal employees may use a combination of the
InfoPath client and browsers to participate in various business processes across the enterprise.
When the Office 2007 suite hit the streets, Microsoft introduced a very exciting feature: Forms
Services 2007 — included in the enterprise version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

If you are interested in learning about electronic forms integration with
Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007, Chapter 14 (by John Holliday) in the book
Professional SharePoint 2007 Development (Wrox, 2007), is a great resource.

In a nutshell, Forms Services was all about allowing end users to use their browsers to fi ll out
InfoPath forms and allowing administrators to manage those forms. Form Services 2007 was a
great move to help extend the reach of electronic forms by ensuring that electronic forms can render
content for a wide range of users using various client applications and different devices. The concept
of content types and their association with form templates, two-way synching between form data
fields and columns, and a better deployment model were all among major improvements Microsoft
made to the product at that time.
With the power of the SharePoint Server 2010 platform, InfoPath 2010 and Forms Services 2010
represent even more significant improvements over their predecessors. Some of the improvements
came from the core platform itself and some were made available in each product.
InfoPath 2010, available in the Professional Plus volume license SKU, is a form creation and datagathering tool that ships with the Microsoft Office 2010 package. If we consider InfoPath 2003
Service Pack 1 as a major iteration in the product’s lifecycle, then InfoPath, in its fourth iteration
with the 2010 release, has evolved way beyond the product that was released back in August 2003.
InfoPath 2010 is the most compelling release to date and is the quickest way to have a common form
rendition in the browser as well as in rich and offline clients.
Once you install InfoPath 2010, the fi rst thing that you may notice is that InfoPath 2010 comes with

two flavors: InfoPath Designer and InfoPath Filler. InfoPath Designer 2010 is the primary tool used
by designers to create and design the forms with easy-to-use features based on pre-built templates
and baked-in functionalities. As the name implies, InfoPath Filler 2010 comes with a Fluent UI,
which provides a much improved and yet simpler end user experience for filling out forms.

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Introducing the Training Management Application

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The following list provides a sneak peek of some of the new features introduced in InfoPath 2010
and InfoPath Form Services 2010:
➤

Richer browser forms with shorter load time.

➤

The capability to handle more requests per second.

➤

The capability to customize SharePoint list forms.

➤

A brand-new InfoPath Form web part.

➤

Equal rendition across the major browsers. Compliant browser forms (WCAG 2.0,
XHTML 1.0, and strict CSS).

➤

Integration with Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

➤

Ability to query REST web services/ SharePoint REST APIs.

➤

Native offl ine integration with SharePoint through SharePoint Workspace 2010 client.

➤

New controls like the People/Group Picker, Date Time Picker, and Picture button.

➤

On-premises or multi-tenant hosting support (i.e., SharePoint online).

➤

Ability to script various operations using PowerShell, backup, and restore.

➤

Seamless integration with new Health Rule Defi nitions.

Enterprise forms is a broad topic that could make up several chapters, if not its own book.
However, after reading this chapter, you will have a good understanding of how to leverage
InfoPath in SharePoint to rapidly design and create forms used in enterprise management processes
across your organization.
And with that, it is time to get started.

INTRODUCING THE TRAINING MANAGEMENT APPLICATION
In this chapter, you’ll use an example of a Training Management application at a fictitious company,
Adventure Works, which illustrates some of the new capabilities of InfoPath 2010 and Forms
Services 2010. First, take a look at how this application works from the user’s perspective.
The Human Resources (HR) department at Adventure Works uses SharePoint and InfoPath to
implement a training-course system. You can think of the Training Management application as a set
of three use cases as follows:
➤

New training creation use case

➤

Training registration use case

➤

Increment stat counter use case

As illustrated in Figure 9-1, Adventure Works staff can perform various activities in this application.
For example, the training coordinator can create trainings and add them to a SharePoint list named
Trainings. This list will be customized and enhanced by InfoPath 2010 to facilitate the training
creation use case.

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CHAPTER 9 ELECTRONIC FORMS

Also, the Human Resources department at Adventure Works allows its employees to register for
a training opportunity. The training registration form is designed in InfoPath and hosted inside
the new InfoPath Form web part on a web part page named Trainings Dashboard. The training
registration form must be rendered in a typical desktop web browser and in browsers on handheld
or mobile devices.
Once a training request is fi lled out and saved, the result is stored in a form library named
Registrations, and an event handler associated with the Registrations form library fi res and updates
a counter in another custom SharePoint list, named Stats. The Stats list is hidden from employees
so that its content can’t be modified and it does not clutter navigation. At the end, the registration
form is connected to the Stats list through the web part connections framework in SharePoint to
demonstrate a simple form-driven mashup scenario.
As you may notice, the primary forms in driving the business process just described are all

electronic forms and implemented in InfoPath 2010. The following diagram demonstrates a high
level overview of the Training Management application.

Stats
(Custom List)

U

pd

at

e:

Ev

en

tH

an

Add & Edit

Add & Edit

dl

er

Trainings
(Custom List)
Training
Creation
Form

Training Coordinator

Registrations
(Form Library)

Query & Filter using
REST or SharePoint Adaptor

Registration
Form

Employees

FIGURE 9-1

CUSTOMIZING SHAREPOINT LIST FORMS
In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, list forms were regular ASP.NET pages serving as the visual
interfaces to add an item to, or edit or display an item in, that list. Typically, list forms were
defi ned in the list template and instantiated upon the creation of a new list instance. Although

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Customizing SharePoint List Forms

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there are several ways to replace the out-of-the-box list forms (DispForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx,
and NewForm.aspx) with custom ASPX pages, as described in the following list, each approach
introduces its own challenges:

1.

SharePoint Designer Customization: In this approach, you use SharePoint Designer 2007
to modify the layout of list forms and add custom business logic. For example, you could
create a new NewForm.aspx form from scratch. This approach introduces a very limited
customizability that limits you to using HTML, JavaScript, and Extensible Stylesheet
Language (XSL) only. Additionally, customizing list forms using SharePoint Designer 2007
results in inserting a fairly big chunk of XSL into the HTML markup of the form, which
makes it even harder to maintain!

2.

Customizing List Forms via a Browser: You can add web parts to the Display, Edit, and
New forms via a browser to add business logic for the inserting and editing of list item data.
The problem with this approach is that Microsoft clearly states that it is not supported,
meaning that if something breaks you’ll have to remove the web part and leave the default
List Form web part as the only web part on the page. This is certainly not a solution that
you can always rely on either.

3.

Using Custom Content Types with Associated Custom Forms: This is a better approach than
the other two, because you can use all your ASP.NET coding skill sets and deploy the list
forms in a much cleaner way. However, you cannot leverage this approach for the existing
content types or lists that are not yours. You must add to this the extra code that you would
have to write to handle the CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations that your
custom UI requires when interacting with lists, such as wrapping your calls to Update()
methods in a try/catch block and trap for exceptions like concurrency violations and so on.

One of the exciting features in InfoPath 2010 is the ability to extend or enhance the forms used
by SharePoint lists for creating, editing, or showing list items. Today, you can modify list forms
layouts, set validation rules, or create additional views using little or no code. When you are fi nished
modifying the list forms, reflecting your changes back to SharePoint is just a matter of using the
one-click publishing capability that comes out of the box with the list form.
In this section, you will explore some of the new functionalities of InfoPath 2010 used to customize
SharePoint list forms in the context of a Training Management application, which you will build
throughout the chapter.

Creating the Trainings List
Before diving into customizing the Trainings list forms using InfoPath, you need to create the
SharePoint list and add the required fields to it. Business requirements of the Training Management
application dictate that the training coordinator be able to create new training opportunities by
selecting Add New Item in the Trainings list. This list resides on the Human Resources website and
requires the following information:

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➤

Title: A title for the training opportunity

➤

Code: A code that uniquely identifies the training (unique eight-character fi xed)

➤

Description: The description of the training

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Related Wrox Books
Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010
ISBN: 978-0-470-64316-7
Covering both the design and business applications of SharePoint Designer, this complete Wrox guide brings
readers thoroughly up to speed on how to use SharePoint Designer in an enterprise. You’ll learn to create
and modify web pages, use CSS editing tools to modify themes, use Data View to create interactivity with
SharePoint and other data, and much more.

Professional Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010
ISBN: 978-0-470-61790-8
With this in-depth guide, a team of SharePoint experts walks you through the features of the new BCS,
including the ability for users to view and modify the data from SharePoint 2010 with BCS. You’ll explore how
to use BCS, deploy solutions, create external content types and lists, create .NET host connectors, and more.

Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design
ISBN: 978-0-470-58464-4

Creating a branded SharePoint site involves understanding both traditional web design techniques as well
as topics that are typically reserved for developers. This book bridges that gap by not only providing expert
guidance for creating beautiful public facing and internal intranet sites but it also addresses the needs of
those readers that only want to understand the basics enough to apply some style to their sites.

Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration
ISBN: 978-0-470-53333-8
SharePoint 2010 boasts a variety of incredible features that will challenge even the most experienced
administrator who is upgrading from SharePoint 2007. Written by a team of SharePoint experts, this book
takes aim at showing you how to make these new features work right for you.

Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs
ISBN: 978-0-470-59713-2
This book is a must-have anthology of current best practices for SharePoint 2010 from over 20 of the top
SharePoint MVPs. They offer insider advice on everything from installation, workflow, and web parts to
business connectivity services, web content management, and claims-based security.

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management
ISBN: 978-0-470-58465-1
If you’re interested in building web sites using the new capabilities of enterprise content management (ECM)
in SharePoint 2010, then this book is for you. You’ll discover how SharePoint 2010 spans rich document
management, records management, business process management, and web content management in a
seamless way to manage, and share content.


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