I'll start off by saying this: I like Infopath - well I want to like it.
It is VERY much a v1.0 program. Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to develop it further in the next few iterations.
The VSTO 2005 tools are a good start - this allows you to create managed code behind rather than ugly JavaScript. My issue is that it is really hard to do anything productive. I don't speak XPath at the moment, so it's really down to trial and error to figure out what to do.
Case in point, I was trying to autoincrement field in a repeating table. I did my usual things - googled, google groups, documentation - nothing found a solution. I tried quite a few things from Google groups, most didn't work at all and some would sort of work.
Anyway, after half a day of trial and error and reading the docs, it appears that I can use an expression field and have its default value set to position(). Thats great but it shouldn't take half a day to work out. I mean this is a fairly standard thing to want to do.
Hopefully in Office 12 Infopath will be improved. As I said before I think it has the potential to be huge - in our company for example, there are literally hundreds of documents someone has made as read-only Word templates available on the intranet, but these need to be printed out and filled in by hand. Obvious job for Infopath, however at current state it would be a big job to convert.
I might wait for the next version before I recommend that upgrade.....
2 comments:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, James. I work on InfoPath and I can understand that the open standards technology we use (XML, XSD, XSLT, XPath) are all well and fine for geeks but it's hard to put a usable wrapper around it.
The calculations (fx button) we added in InfoPath 2003 SP1 helps, some.
There does reach a point, though, where are declarative stuff reaches a certain limit and you have to read up on XPath and XSLT functions.
At least there are plenty of resources for it vs. being some odd Microsoft-only expression language.
I think the VS integration stuff coming up in Office 2007 will knock your socks off. Please give the Beta2 a whirl when it comes out later this year.
Cheers,
== Eric
G'day Eric.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I take your comments on board. Maybe I should brush up on my XPath knowledge.
Like I said in the post, I can see where you guys are heading with Infopath and it is pretty exciting. Keep up the good work and I will be watching with interest!
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