MOSS DIP questions

[Robinhood]

MOSS DIP, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Document Information
Panel, a product of InfoPath 2007 whereby you can develop a custom form, and
say put in required fields of meta data (aka document properties) for a
document library.

Questions:

1. is there an easy way to link a default DIP across multiple libraries,
such as "default for Office applications"? Having to edit a custom DIP in
InfoPath, and publish into each library is a real chore.

2. Having replaced a DIP adding new fields to the "document" type in a
SharePoint library... new dip works great on creating a new doc... but on
upload, the fields are not the same as on DIP. example I have something like
6 drop down lists in the DIP, and on upload I get all the fields, but only 3
are drop downs, and the other 3 are text boxes...

3. I'm populating the drop down lists with a data source that is a
SharePoint list. I had to change the reference from "Lookup" to "single line
of text" because in the former the default value was id, not title. The
result was that searching on metadata required input of the list item number,
not it's name to return data. Keying on the title works great... except that
for whatever reason, those items are not showing up as manditory, cannot be
blank, and I want them to. How do I?

 

[Robin]

OK I'll reply to this, somebody may be wanting the same info I was searching
for when I asked the questions.

My questions betray an assumption, namely that since the document upload and
edit properties screens contain drop down lists they must be coming from the
DIP (document information panel) that is created by InfoPath. That is a false
assumption. It turns out that if the column type is “lookup†rather than
“single line of text†you’ll get a dropdown list, and this behavior is
irrespective of whether or not you have a DIP assigned to the library.
Apparently you get a default DIP (unconnected to InfoPath)if you have
required columns in the library.

The reason this is important, is because in the case of a "lookup" column
(that points to a SharePoint list), it seems for the metadata to be
successfully searched, you have to use the id which is numeric, rather than
the item title which is textual. I'm told by MicroSoft that this is a default
function an you can't change the search to use item title.

The rest of my questions involved a clean way to navigate through the UI
hell that is trying to standardize one InfoPath DIP across multiple libraries
in a site. The answer is that unless you write code for it, you go through UI
hell…

So to put a plug in for an enterprizing code writer; writing a module that
would standardize a particular DIP file across all libraries in a site would
be a hot item I think.

Hope these ramblings help someone else.

/Robin