Whew, last week was a challenge. I
just finished up running SharePoint 2013 Workflow and InfoPath No-Code Development and there were a LOT of good questions that came up. I tried to pick out the top 4 to share today.
Can I use a button in InfoPath to Submit and Print at the same time?
The scenario for this one is a form that needs to be printed for records. Once the form is submitted the business processes begin to modify it immediately which makes printing out the form “problematic”. The bad news is that there really isn’t a way to do this without code. Once you start using code, you then have to allow SharePoint to trust all the code which is not considered a best practice.
There are some alternatives though. If using InfoPath Web Services, you can print from the web browser by adding a button to your page through html to print the document. See this page for more details.
One other option is to submit the form to multiple locations by adding an additional rule to submit to another location before submitting to the business process location. By submitting a copy to a location that can lock the record as it existed when it was submitted, you essentially can keep a printable copy for as long as you need it.
Is there a limit to the number of rules and actions on a field or control in InfoPath?
Yes and No. There is not a limit, as far as I know, that states that you can only have so many rules. BUT, there is a limit in InfoPath that only 16 actions can cascade (or chain) through a form. If we have a rule that triggers another rule that triggers another rule, etc… the 16th rule that is triggered will indicate to InfoPath that you have an infinite loop and it will stop the rules from going any further.
I have a Database with a table of locations and events. The locations change on a regular basis but I want a drop down menu to select from unique locations.
This was really interesting. What I usually do is have InfoPath pull all the records and then filter as part of the form. This case was talking about 7k to 27k records! While InfoPath can technically do this, the performance hit is not worth it. I had to do a little digging as I thought there had to be a way to customize the SQL connection to make the SQL server do the filtering.
I was right and you need to setup a SQL data connection to a SQL server. In that data connection, you will have the option to customize the SQL query. You need to add the word DISTINCT to the query; i.e. “Select Distinct “name” from “Users”). This will return results to the SharePoint data connection with SQL doing the filtering.
Can I use the SharePoint 2013 Workflow web service action to talk to other sites?
No. At this point, all the default web services in SharePoint are SOAP based and this particular action is only for REST protocol web services.
If these are the kinds of topics you are interested in, then check out our SharePoint 2013 Workflow and InfoPath No-Code Development course. InfoPath remains a powerful provider of form functionality with workflows being a very powerful way to automate SharePoint based business processes. Hope to see you in class soon!