Poor design time performance with large forms.

[G. Tarazi]

I am still using SP1 beta, and maybe this problem is solved in the final release, but anyway, the main idea of using Microsoft InfoPath is for it's abilities to work with large forms, and by large forms I mean a schema with 500+ fields, separated in multiple nested sections.



The schema is written by Microsoft VS.NET 2003, and imported to InfoPath, then th fields are mapped to the schema.



Problems:

- If the fields are in nested sections, the form becomes extremely slow during design time.

- The mouse pointer changes to all possible shapes when it must not, things like resize, drag and drop, copy and paste, becomes way more complicated to do.

- Even if you split the sections as separate, the form is still slower than usual.



The tests are done on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, VS.NET 2003, InfoPath 2003 SP1 Preview, the server is 2 XEON 3 GHZ Processors, 1GB RAM, the connection to the server is the remote terminal client.

 

[Brian Teutsch [MSFT]]

It's not the size of the schema that will slow you down, but rather the
amount of stuff in the view. If your solution contains a large number of
controls, it will suffer some performance problems. InfoPath forms generally
don't perform that well as they get above 10 or 20 pages, either while
creating a form or while editing a form.

It's definitely recommended to create multiple views to make sure the form
is performant while users are filling it out.

Thanks,
Brian

"G. Tarazi" <Tarazi (at) LiveTechnologies.ca> wrote in message
I am still using SP1 beta, and maybe this problem is solved in the final
release, but anyway, the main idea of using Microsoft InfoPath is for it's
abilities to work with large forms, and by large forms I mean a schema with
500+ fields, separated in multiple nested sections.

The schema is written by Microsoft VS.NET 2003, and imported to InfoPath,
then th fields are mapped to the schema.

Problems:
- If the fields are in nested sections, the form becomes extremely
slow during design time.
- The mouse pointer changes to all possible shapes when it must not,
things like resize, drag and drop, copy and paste, becomes way more
complicated to do.
- Even if you split the sections as separate, the form is still
slower than usual.

The tests are done on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, VS.NET 2003, InfoPath
2003 SP1 Preview, the server is 2 XEON 3 GHZ Processors, 1GB RAM, the
connection to the server is the remote terminal client.

 

[G. Tarazi]

Hi Brian



Thank you for the advice, actually more views make more since, since some of
our forms are up to 80 pages long, I will try to convince the design team
about that.



Now another question, is there is a possibility to make InfoPath printing
the views (view 1 to 5) automatically when the print button is pressed?



Thank you