Developing Solutions with Microsoft InfoPath(TM) (Pro-Developer) [Paperback]

Patrick Halstead (Author), Matthew Blain (Author), Vani Mandava-Teredesai (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pro-Developer | Publication Date: November 24, 2004

Build innovative, XML-based solutions faster—with expert guidance from three veterans of the Microsoft InfoPath design team. Discover how to use common InfoPath design patterns to accelerate the development of forms with a dynamic, easy-to-use front end that connects seamlessly with middle-tier services and back-end servers, including databases, Web services, and Microsoft BizTalk® Server. The authors walk you through a range of programming scenarios—explaining the pros and cons of various approaches and sharing their best practices and undocumented tips. You’ll also find real-world examples, including a complete, three-tier business solution.

Discover how to:

• Customize and deploy your own InfoPath forms, taking advantage of ready-made sample code
• Create “smart” InfoPath forms to provide a dynamic experience using conditional visibility, data validation, and autopopulation
• Design a rich form interface with structured and dynamic sections, multiple views, and calculations
• Build forms-based workflow processing into InfoPath forms using e-mail, SharePoint® servers, and BizTalk
• Use the Microsoft .NET common language runtime-based object model to increase development flexibility
• Receive and submit data for your forms using back-end databases and Web services

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Halstead founded Autonomy Systems LLC, to help companies streamline data-handling costs and improve data analysis using Microsoft Office-based solutions. A former Microsoft developer, Patrick led solutions development for the first version of InfoPath. He is a 2004 Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Office System InfoPath.

Matthew Blain is Director of Software Development for Serriform, LLC, a firm that designs and delivers enterprise-class software solutions. Previously, Matthew worked at Microsoft as a developer for Internet Explorer® and on the team which later developed InfoPath.

Vani Mandava-Teredesai is Lead Software Design Engineer for Testing on the InfoPath product team and has worked on InfoPath since its inception. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition, a research center at State University of New York Buffalo.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (November 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8120327411
• ISBN-13: 978-0735621169
• ASIN: 0735621160
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,029,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you must code in InfoPath, this is the only book, February 3, 2005

By 

David A. Leon (Los Angeles, California USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Developing Solutions with Microsoft InfoPath(TM) (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

With all due respect to my esteemed fellow InfoPath programmer, this is the only book worth owning if you have to code complex projects in InfoPath VBScript or JavaScript. InfoPath is supposed to be the world's most cutting edge XML tool. With it's strong hooks to Web Services, it's supposed to be a thin-client tool for th 21st century. But how do you code connections to a Web Service? How do you auto populate a form using information queried from a web service? How do you query a web service from code in the first place? How do you access a UDDI catalog from code? How do you fill a list box with a number of web service descriptions to let the user choose which one is the correct service? How do you code a master-detail one-to-many form in VBScript or JScript?

This is the only book which shows you how to code this very common, typical, highly characteristic programming problems.

9 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Started good and then fizzled, January 27, 2005

By 

River - See all my reviews

This review is from: Developing Solutions with Microsoft InfoPath(TM) (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

I understand that it's probably not that easy to write a book for something like InfoPath. It's a powerful product that has tons of ins and outs; however, I expected much more for my money. Some of the examples in the book get shortchanged on explanation, and the reader is often left to fill in the gaps. In addition to that, some chapters, like chapter 10 don't even have functioning code. For instance, see if you can spot the error with this line of critical code:

Dim sContact As String = String.Format("//Roles/Approvers/{0}[@alias=" & Quote & "{1}" & Quote & "]", sAlias)

Perhaps it's just me but it seems that the string.format needs to be passed two arguments rather than one. This is in a project that attempts to implement workflow.

This also brings to mind how the DEVELOPMENT part of the book is handled. It's fairly standard in development books to start out with simple examples and build iteratively in complexity as you go. Not with this book, you get little bits and pieces of managed code and then get a BUNCH of code in Chapter 10. Not sure why the authors decided on this style. Perhaps they were trying to show how far you can go with declarative programming.

As far as InfoPath goes, I am not sure how the standard everyday user of Office products is supposed to get excited here. The minute you need to do something even moderately standard, like having multiple sign-offs on a document, you are forced to code. And once you are forced to code you had better understand the DOM, XML, XPath, etc. Not sure what Microsoft was thinking.


Not sure that this book is much help.

1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for advanced InfoPath topics, June 13, 2005

By 

Braintrove.com (http://www.braintrove.com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Developing Solutions with Microsoft InfoPath(TM) (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

If you want to get more indepth with InfoPath, this is the book for you. It covers advanced topics to launch you into designing more powerful digital forms.

I especially enjoying the topics on workflow, sharepoint and Web service integration.