Customer Reviews

Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As XML has become the industry standard, Microsoft has increasingly oriented its Office suite to use it. The latest result is this enhanced InfoPath, in its 2007 incarnation. The book is divided into two parts. Each targeting a different audience.

The first part is aimed at a general purpose Office user, who is not assumed to be a programmer. It addresses what is a problem plaguing XML. If you want to make a new XML schema to use as a template for future data instances, you often have to write the explicit XML tags. Unfortunately, the syntax can be overwhelming to many. Plus, explicitly writing the tags is extremely error prone. What InfoPath has done is make an easy to use graphical front end. Far friendlier to the user. This user interface then can generate a schema in a robust fashion. Even people capable of editing schemas directly might still want to use what Microsoft has provided.

Along these lines, chapter 5 is a good example. While not perhaps directly concerning schema, it tackles the problem of validating what the user types into a form. It follows the approach that you should clean up your data as early as possible. Preferably before it even gets into the database. The UI lets you impose constraints on the user input into various fields of your form, by offering dialog windows with many options.

All commendably straightforward.

The second section of the text is mostly for programmers, who have already written code for Office.

This book is a great narrative style resource for learning all of the elements and techniques in InfoPath 2007. The style of writing is a bit different as it has more of a reading focus than a reference focus. So if you are looking for solely a reference book you might want something different. The authors are TOP NOTCH though and do an excellent job.(Especially with Forms Services gotcha's/warnings) The demos/samples/sample forms they let you download from the Addison Wesley website are WELL WORTH THE EFFORT of getting and are a great learning tool.

This is the first InfoPath book I have found answers every question I have had about InfoPath. The beauty of this book is although it does cover a lot of the technical side of InfoPath it also deals with some of the simpler solutions that are best achieved with just the InfoPath designer and declarative logic. With an easy to read style and lots of samples this book has become the definitive InfoPath resource in my technical library.

If you're just beginning with InfoPath this book is for you. If you've creating solutions with InfoPath since day one I'm still confident that this book would be a worthwhile investment.

Good job guys!

As many of the previous reviews before mine can attest, this is a great book and one of many other definitive Infopath reference-literature for someone needing to work with Infopath on an ongoing professional environment.

What differentiates this book from others is its narrative.

I have been reading IT technical books for 24 years now and very rarely I find a book so easy to follow.

I didn't need that extra cafeine-hit to keep me awake after 20 minutes reading this book. I did need a PC beside me to practice what I was reading from time to time, and only because I like to bring thoughts come into life. However the book does enough on its own to keep you going without any yawns.

This book was written by two Microsoft employees focused on InfoPath, and includes a foreword by InfoPath cocreator Jean Paoli. At ~1,200 pages, it's a timely and thorough resource for developers who need to understand InfoPath and Forms Services, including coverage of VSTA, VSTO, and other related topics. It's unsurprisingly a largely accentuate-the-positive book, but it also includes useful summaries of, for example, features that can be used in the InfoPath client but not in Forms Services.

Most of the InfoPath books out there do not address Forms Services like this book does. Even if you have never worked with InfoPath or Forms Services before in your life, this 1223 page book takes you from the very basic topics to the very advanced. What makes this book The Best is that it actually addresses most of the problems InfoPath developers face when developing and deploying forms, specially in a web/intranet environment. For anyone and everyone who is or wants to work with InfoPath 2007, I can't think of a better reference than "Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007".

At over 1200 pages, this book is obviously not for the faint of heart (at four pounds, it's a cardio workout just to carry it around!). If you're looking for a quick overview of InfoPath, this ain't it!

I have found it to be equivalent to a college level course on InfoPath. The authors strive to keep a narrative style through highly technical information - and sometimes they fail, but for the most part, things are explained well.

Illustrations are complete, you don't need to follow along at the keyboard. In fact, my approach was to read this book away from my computer, finish a topic, then attempt to apply the lesson at the computer, using the book as a reference. It takes time, but it has proved a most effective learning method.

I would have liked to see some sort of 30,000 foot overview, or a "mall map" ("you are here") to help guide me along the knowledge trail - it's easy to get lost in so much prose. It would be great to have a companion book of about 200 pages, summarizing the chapters, with references to this "mothership" of knowledge.

However, I've found few technical books that are as complete in their coverage of a subject. If you can muster the time, the patience, the focus, and to some degree the courage to take on this book and read it cover to cover, you will truly have near expert level understanding and skills in InfoPath.

21 chapters 1158 pages, explains the blueprint planning process required for building forms. (This design process is outstanding and teaches at a very user friendly, yet indepth level. The first 12 Chapters teaches just how InfoPath recieves, maintains, process XML Code from nodes /leaf nodes to XML files. Explains the Layout, adding controls, Data Source and Data source binding, Creating multi Views for printing and viewing information and lastly methods of deployment including security.
InfoPath can now be tweaked for almost any "form" requirements you can think up and without the use of any code writing.
But for you XML code wizards, Chapter 15,16 goes indepth on Event Bubbling, adding Password code, and many other XML code writing subjects including the use of Visual Studio. I myself found it to be useful knowledge, even if I never alter a line of code, though mostlikely I will.
I would have to say this book covers every aspect of Form Design including E-Mail deployment, web deployment and lastly local server deployment.
If you plan to build a InfoPath form, this book is a must have reference.
Get out your highlighter though! (Better yet, make it two or three).
Good work by both, Scott and Hagen, including the entire InfoPath team.
Bill>"M"

This book is the as detailed and in-depth as a book can be on a technology, that can be put into a book and still be even marginally useful. Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007 covers about every aspect of the technology that you may want to know about. The book starts with a brief introduction to the tool and what its intended purpose. From there it quickly delves off into the details of form creation, starting with the layouts. There is lots of information on most of the important controls, how to use them, format them, and control the advanced aspects, such as default and calculated values, formatting, data binding from external sources. When it comes to controls there is finally some good guidance on rules, validation and internal/declarative logic.

There are informative sections on data binding to various sources, mainly xml, Sql Server and SharePoint. There is also detailed treatment of programming the forms.

Of particular interest to me was the ability to create forms to be used in a Forms Services context. Using the material in this book I have been able to complete several successful Forms Services implementations.

The two criticisms of the book are that 1) in some cases the information is more theoretical than practical and that 2) it may be too much information for a book. An example of number 1 is the explanation of Template Parts. This functionality seems more like a good idea that is not quite adequate for practical applications. There are definitely issues in getting it to work and there is no indication of this in the book. In other words they present it as if you this, this and that and it will all work fine.

As to my second criticism, the book pushes the limits of what can be put into a book without it being cluttered and better off referring the reader to the detailed technical documentation.

In all I highly recommend this book as a desk reference for the serious InfoPath developer.

This book has been well written in terms of content. It nicely explains the basic concepts, though in some places it assumes the user is somehow aware of programming lingo etc.. However you can easily learn the basis by going through the book step by step.

In most cases, the whole thing is being explained in paragraph format - that means no use of bulleted or numbered lists or no use of step 1, step 2, step 3 etc!

In terms of formatting, the books is totally 'plain text'!! As there are very few usage of conventions, particularly, no used o bold text or specific format to explain sepcific type of instructions e.g, when referring to program step etc.

This is really irritating as we have to go through the whole literature-like paragraphs to understand and graps the context.

Another irritating thing is that there is no CD included for sample files etc. Wherever the autor refer to a sample file, that reference comes only at the end of whole story - that means sometimes you have to read a full page and in the end it will say 'The example used here is abc.xml which is included on website of book! What a rubbish thing. They should tell upfront that 'We are using file abc.xml going forward'!!