I'm Back

It's funny. I don't know if anyone is reading this other than me but I still feel that I should explain my absence. It's been a busy week and I have been totally exhausted by the time evening comes around. Over the weekend I was in bed by 9:30 which is very unusual for me. Guess I needed to catch up on my rest. At least I was smart enough to listen to my body and go to bed.

My project continues to move forward. I am adding and testing additional functionality to the InfoPath forms. I think that we should use some conditional formatting to highlight both required fields and data entry errors. There seem to be some disagreement on the team; but we are still talking it through. I don't want the forms to look like a Xmas tree but they could use a little visual feedback.

I am convinced by now that the InfoPath forms should have all the files extracted from the .xsn files. The form can still be build with the drag and drop GUI interface but you know have access to the raw XML files. Just like web pages knowing the code as well as using a GUI interface will make the end result much better. I am currently working on adapting one of the examples (dynamic help) from www.infopathdev.com. Instead of field level help like in the example, I am going for more of a section level dynamic help. For our application and the number of input fields some of these forms are going to have; field level help would make no sense. Despite a few relatively minor annoyances, InfoPath is working well for this project. If we can solve the offline form issues we are having we should have this part of the project designed. After that as soon as we get specs we can start building the live InfoPath forms.