xml output

[John Tucker]

How do I go about creating a form template
so that the users can open it in a browser
and save their completed results
as an xml file which is valid according to the .xsd schema
that I used to create the form?

(this is the government. we have far too many paper forms floating around
....)

thanks,
John Tucker

 

[Ben Walters]

Hey John,
This is pretty easy all you have to do is design your form of the existing
XSD you want it to adhere to,
The following link has a video that will show you how to import an existing
XSD when designing your form template

Hope this helps
Cheers,
Ben Walters

 

[Swathi (GGK Tech)]

Hi,
It is easy as Ben Walter said. First you need to design a form using the xsd
schema that you have. And take a submit connection to store the submitted
forms in a document library. After completing this, publish the form to
SharePoint library. Once you submit the form, the form will be saved as xml
document in the SharePoint library to where you have taken the data
connection.

 

[John Tucker]

Okay, thanks Ben and Swathi ...

I'd actually already got that far ...
the input part of it works very nicely and the typing is great.

At some point, I am going to try it with the schemas
from the ISO 19139 namespace
(with all the imports and includes, they come to maybe a thousand pages)
http://schemas.opengis.net/iso/19139/20060504/gmd/metadataEntity.xsd

For right now, my immediate problem
is to figure out how InfoPath, under the direction of a user filling out one
of my forms,
can be made to ouput an xml instance
populated with the information he entered,
which validates against the schema that I used to design the form.

Our organization does not have current access to a SharePoint Server
and besides,
some of my users need to work offline
and submit their results as xml files when they regain connectivity.

How do we do this?

thanks,
John


My concern is the output

 

[Ben Walters]

Hey John,
XML output is the default for any form saved by InfoPath (basically you
create a form template that is a .xsn file, and any filled out form is saved
as a .xml file), and assuming the form was built using your desired schema
that XML file will be validated against that schema as the form is being
entered, as for the submission considering you don't have access to
SharePoint I would suggest either submiting to a web service or submit the
form via email.

Submitting via email works well as the email will sit in the users outbox
until they are next online, on the backend this then means you need a
service that monitors that email inbox and can process the forms as the come
through.

Submitting to a web service would either require the user to initially save
the completed form locally on their machine then once they were back online
they would need to open the form and then submit it to the web service for
processing.
If you wanted to automate this submit to webservice I would see you need to
create a windows service that tracks each of the forms submitted and when
the machine is back online then pushes the submitted forms through to the
webservice for processing.

I know this doesn't give you a direct answer but I hope it helps spark some
ideas

Cheers,
Ben Walters

 

[John Tucker]

bless my soul!

I can save the form from InfoPath,
and open it in IE,
fill it out,
and save the result as an xml instance
with the tags and structure from my schema!

Can we go down to hell and have a snowball fight?

many thanks,
JohnT