I’ve recently been doing some work updating our MOSS website (http://www.isc-software.com – article coming soon), and the need arose to capture user information in two scenarios: Event Registration and Sales Queries. Initially, I saw two options: A customised list item form, or a full blown InfoPath Forms Services form. Since I didn’t want to hack around with securities and lists too much, and keep things as clean as possible, IPFS was the only choice. I didn’t want the user to have to navigate to another page to fill out the form, but rather I wanted to mimic some of the newer popup styles seen on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.
For events registration, the user journey takes the following route:
1. User clicks “Register Now” on the event page.
2. A CSS / JavaScript popup window appears in the browser, and passes the form an event ID.
3. The form loads in the DIV layer, and queries the SharePoint page library to get summary details of the event.
4. The user fills out the form and submits (all standard InfoPath validation + formatting apply).
5. The form submits the data to a SharePoint list behind the scenes, using the SharePoint web services. (Custom code – future article?)
5. The form shows a summary and the user closes the popup.
Anyway this is really just a short summary I know, but if anyone wants me to blog any part of it in greater detail then I can – just drop me a comment.
See it in live: http://www.isc-software.com/events/Pages/Seminar1.aspx
davros.
I love your blog title. 🙂
Have you had any luck creating a public infopath form that saves the entire form as an InfoPath file?
My form has dozens of fields and I would like to keep it. Eventually, i found a way to do it, but it wasn’t as nice as i hoped.
Do you happen to know if 2010 supports Anonymous InfoPath forms in a better way?
http://sharepointfeaturesandfailures.blogspot.com/2007/11/anonymous-infopath-forms.html
To be honest the only way i’ve done it in the past is to write a web service that accepts the entire form XML and manually saves it into a library / submits to a DB – impersonating another user of course, you don’t want to open the library up to anonymous access, else people will access each other’s forms!