Foreword

Designing Forms for SharePoint and InfoPath is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft InfoPath.

Like the Web, InfoPath continues to grow and change and has evolved toward a holistic story around rapid development of workflow applications on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Together with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010 facilitates creation of end-to-end solutions that feature powerful forms together with enterprise-scale workflow and access to key business data. InfoPath was designed, at its core, as a powerful XML editing engine that enables end users to interface easily with data.

The present book is based largely on Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007, which was written by two distinguished members of the InfoPath product team who designed, implemented, and tested many of the core features of the product. In revising the book for this edition, we have tried to keep the deep encyclopedic knowledge of InfoPath embodied in that work, while also restructuring the material to focus attention on the SharePoint application development experience. The book has been updated as well to call attention to the new features introduced in InfoPath 2010 to help build more powerful SharePoint applications—features such as:

• Customizing the forms used to create, view, and edit SharePoint list items

• Dynamic queries to REST Web services

• The InfoPath Form Web part, which allows you to create powerful Web parts without writing code, and to connect them with other Web parts to create data mashups

What’s interesting and unique about InfoPath is the type of information it allows people to gather. InfoPath lets organizations design and edit “semistructured” documents, or documents that have regions of meaning, in the same way that columns in a database have meaning. While the program provides great design and editing capabilities for traditional forms such as purchase orders and equipment requests, InfoPath innovatively yet squarely targets information that historically has been more difficult to capture, such as business-critical data contained in sales reports, inventory updates, project memos, travel itineraries, and performance reviews. InfoPath was born as a tool for editing XML, and XML is about creating documents in which the content is delimited, or set apart, by tags that explain the meaning of each piece of content. With XML, documents can become a source of information as rich as a database, enabling search, processing, and reuse. The underlying structure of the information in an InfoPath template is described using a schema. A schema describes how the data is constructed, in the same way that a blueprint describes how a building is constructed. In SharePoint, these schemas are represented as content types in lists and libraries, and InfoPath provides a consistent way to author forms and logic that turn these lists and libraries into powerful applications that automate processes that previously required many manual steps.

Microsoft’s long-term vision for InfoPath has always been about more than the ability to rapidly create forms: It is about building complete end-to-end applications using the power of XML and workflow. Together with the powerful collaboration features of SharePoint, InfoPath is a key part of the toolset you need to rapidly create applications that meet your enterprise application needs. InfoPath 2010 and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint 2010 empower business users to automate their own business processes that collect, manage, and share information. IT, developers, and power users can create powerful business applications on the SharePoint platform using InfoPath forms to interact with external data, to drive workflow, and to enhance Web pages.

—Jean Paoli
   General Manager, Interoperability and XML Architecture, Microsoft
      Corporation
   Co-creator of the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation
   Co-creator of Microsoft Office InfoPath

—Nick Dallett
   Program Manager, InfoPath 2003, InfoPath 2007, InfoPath 2010