Category Archives: InfoPath

InfoPath

InfoPath Notify on Specific Changed Fields

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Scenario:

  • Notify specific users upon the change of any field in an infopath form excluding a limited number of fields.
  • InfoPath Full Trust Form
  • SharePoint designer Workflows

I’ve seen lots of people ask for this, with a lot of  the same general response:

it’s not really possible to maintain field-specific change history, or field-specific alerting

I think that Solution 2 below could address this.

Solution 1:

set up rules on every field in the form to set “NotifyParticipatns” to 1 on change.

Pros:

  • No code required

Cons:

  • Lots of rules and room for error

Solution 2:

Global event listener for all xml fields.  Note the XPath selector used for registering the Changed event handler:

"/my:myFields/*"

Conditional for which fields should be included / excluded from the alert.

Set the “NotifyParticipants” based on conditional result.


 public void InternalStartup()
 {
 EventManager.FormEvents.Loading += new LoadingEventHandler(FormEvents_Loading);
 EventManager.XmlEvents["/my:myFields/*"].Changed += new XmlChangedEventHandler(Form_Changed);
 }

<br data-mce-bogus="1">

public void Form_Changed(object sender, XmlEventArgs e)
 {
 // Write your code here to change the main data source.
 List&lt;string&gt; AlertableFields = new List&lt;string&gt;();
 string ModifiedField = e.Site.Name.ToString();
 AlertableFields.Add("my:Street");
 if( AlertableFields.Contains(ModifiedField))
 {
 Debug.WriteLine("Alerting on " + ModifiedField );
 }
 else{
 Debug.WriteLine("Not alerting on " + ModifiedField );
 }
 
 }

 

Pros:

  • Much cleaner solution

Cons:

  • Code.
  • Full Trust

 

InfoPath

Display Approval Tasks on InfoPath Form

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I’be been working through building InfoPath forms to streamline the approval process of some internal documents, and one of the project requirements is to display the date / time as well as comments of each person who approves a document.

I built a SharePoint Designer workflow which first computes the approval routing (which varies between 8 and 10 approvers depending on the value of some fields),  then collects the approvals via the “Start Approval Process” task, and then emails up to 10 SharePoint groups based on a different set of criteria on each document.

SharePoint Designer Workflows store these “Assigned Tasks” in a Task List, which the developer is able to specify.  Each Task in the Task List contains a HIDDEN COLUMN called WorkflowItemId which associates the Task with the Item against which the workflow is running.   This column is a pesky little bugger for reasons explained below.

There is a blog post which describes one method for displaying all approvals tasks on the actual InfoPath form which goes roughly as follows:

  1. Create a new custom list containing all of the columns you need to reference
  2. Edit the “Behavior of a Single Task” for the Approval Process in question so that if the outcome is approved, add a new item to the custom list
  3. Add a Data Connection on the InfoPath form to pull data from the new custom list and display it on the form.

I didn’t want to go through the hassle of creating a separate list for each workflow I’m running, just to store data that’s already being stored in the associated Task List.

So, the big question: Why don’t you just add the Task List as an InfoPath Datasource and call it a day?

Well, the answer to that question may infuriate you: you are unable to filter the list according to the ID of the item in question because the attribute that stores the item id (WorkflowItemId) is forcibly hidden! 

  • InfoPath does not provide WorkflowItemId as an option in the Data Connection query path.
  • CSOM CAML queries error out when you attempt to use WorkflowItemId as a query field, so the SOAP / REST Data Connections in InfoPath also fail.

Other than the solution above, there are really only two other options:

I went the second route, and created such a web service, which is available here: https://github.com/bciu22/ApprovalTaskListService.

The result is that you can add an InfoPath Data Connection that looks something like this:

So that you can have a repeating table on your form with all approvals that looks something like this:

 

InfoPath

Schema Validation Errors While Setting an XML Node Value

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When attempting to set the node value in an InfoPath form with code, “schema validation” errors may appear.   This is primarily caused by attempting to set the value of a field with one of the following data types:

  • Whole Number (integer)
  • Decimal (double)
  • Date (date)
  • Time (time)
  • Date and Time (dateTime)

The workaround is to remove the “nil” attribute from the element:

public void DeleteNil(XPathNavigator node)
{
if (node.MoveToAttribute(“nil”, “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”))
      node.DeleteSelf();
}

Additional Resources: