Sharepoint 2010 : Using InfoPath 2010 to Create Electronic Forms (part 2) - Publish the Form to a SharePoint Library

3. Publish the Form to a SharePoint Library

While we could publish it to a file share, we can just as easily publish it to the library to which we are submitting the data. The benefit of publishing the form to the library is that the user can go to the same location to submit and view expense reports.

From InfoPath, open the File tab and click Publish your form to open the Publish page (Figure 6). The publish page has many publishing options, one being to Publish form to a SharePoint Library. This is the one we are going to select.

Figure 6. The Publish page in InfoPath offers many options for publishing, including publishing to a SharePoint library

The Publishing wizard steps you though the process, asking you for the address of the SharePoint site you’re publishing to. Figure 7 shows where you can specify whether the form should be Web-enabled and whether you are publishing directly to a library, Content Type, or form template. While we are publishing directly to a library, it is very useful to publish the form to a Content Type that can be used across many libraries. We are going to clear the checkbox and not have the form be Web-enabled. We revisit this later when we discuss Forms Services.

Figure 7. The Publishing wizard allows you to specify whether this form should be Web-enabled and whether you are publishing directly to a library, Content Type, or form template

The final steps in the wizard allow you to select from an existing library or to create a new one. Because we have our library already created, we can select it from the list. Once our form has been published, it is now ready to be tested.

4. Testing the Published InfoPath Form

If we browse to our library and click the New button in the ribbon, our Expense Report form opens in the InfoPath client as in Figure 8. You can use the date picker to select dates and add several expenses using the repeating table in the expenses section.

Figure 8. The expense report form launched in the InfoPath client from the Expense Reports Forms library in SharePoint

This submits the data results in a new entry in our Expense Reports library, as you can see in Figure 9. The fields we specified in Figure 3 are now extracted into SharePoint list Columns. This metadata allows you to easily manage these items the same way you would any other item with metadata.

Figure 9. The Forms library contains a new expense report submitted from InfoPath. Selected form fields get converted into list Columns.

The next step in our expense report application would be to add a workflow and have the appropriate manager be notified so they can review the report. This would follow exactly the same process as we did with our expense request workflow earlier.

5. InfoPath Forms Services

SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 both allow you to create forms libraries and to publish directly to them from InfoPath, but each user needs to have InfoPath installed on his or her computer to work with the forms.

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise provides InfoPath Forms Services, which can take a published form template and render it as a Web page. This eliminates the need for the user to have the InfoPath client installed.

Looking back to Figure 7, when publishing our form to Share Point we chose not to enable form rendering. Let’s revisit this, and this time enable form rendering by checking the box Enable this form to be filled out using a browser. Continuing the publication as before, now let’s open our form from the Expense Reports library (see Figure 10).

Figure 10. InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise allows you to render InfoPath forms directly in the browser

The experience in the browser is exactly the same, allowing you to pick dates using a date-picker and even add additional rows for each expense line item.

Note

While InfoPath Forms Services can convert many form elements from the client to the browser, it may have difficulty with certain controls depending on how complicated your form is. For this reason, InfoPath provides a Design Checker where you can check compatibility.

The rendered form even includes a Ribbon with standard actions. You will notice a Save icon. This allows users to save the data directly to the library; however, they would be prompted to provide a file name, which is why we choose to use a submit action instead. InfoPath allows you to disable the ribbon for Web forms, which is what we would do in this case in a production environment.

InfoPath 2010 gives the business user tremendous power for creating forms quickly and relatively easily. Even developers can take advantage of the advanced features such as data connections to really bring the forms to life. With the addition of Forms Services, the need for another deployed client can be eliminated, which is always welcome by IT departments.

Should we also mention the new InfoPath forms Web Control Parts in 2010 that can be used for composite applications and mashups?