News
InfoPath 2003 gets another patty
- By Mike Gunderloy
- February 23, 2004
If you're of a certain age, you probably remember Clara Peller in the Wendy's
commercials complaining, "Where's the beef?" I heard much the same reaction from
many developers when InfoPath 2003 shipped with Office 2003 last fall; it wasn't
at all clear what this new software was good for or how to best use it in an
organization. Well, this week Microsoft is adding some extra beef to the
InfoPath burger.
If you've got a reasonably fast connection, you can hop over to the Microsoft
site and download the InfoPath
2003 Service Pack 1 Preview and InfoPath
2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET. Together, I suspect these are the
pieces that the InfoPath team would have liked to ship in their first public
release, if they hadn't been tied to the Office release schedule. You'll find
new features and new programmability here, as well as the inevitable bug fixes
(which Microsoft refers to as "Technical Updates" in its accompanying press
release.
Here are some quick highlights of what you'll find that's new in these
releases, which are scheduled to be final as part of Office 2003 SP1 in a few
months:
- Visual Studio .NET programmability, along the lines of the Visual Studio
Tools for Office.
- Support for digital signatures
- More flexible form layouts (anyone who's struggled with the current "I
know better than you do" designer will appreciate this)
- More control choices
- More support for complex schemas
- Ink support on Tablet PCs (a critical update for those using InfoPath as a
mobile data collection tool)
- Integration with SharePoint lists
- An improved data model
Even with all these updates, though, there's still a problem with InfoPath
that I wish Microsoft would address: they need a clear, consistent message about
what the heck this thing is good for. Microsoft's InfoPath
FAQ, for example, explains it this way: "InfoPath 2003 can help teams and
organizations efficiently gather the information they need through rich, dynamic
forms. The information collected can then easily be reused throughout
organizations and across business processes because InfoPath 2003 supports
industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) using any customer-defined
schema. InfoPath 2003 customers who share information across their organizations
and business processes can have greater business impact." Well, maybe that makes
sense to the bosses and marketers, but there's not a whole lot there that
developers can get their teeth into.
The issue gets further muddied when you start poking around in the product.
You'll find a forms designer, to be sure (though a woefully underpowered one
compared to that found in just about any other forms-oriented product). You'll
find a piece to automatically update databases. You'll find hooks for Web
services. You'll find the familiar Microsoft Script Editor. You'll find XPath
expressions. You'll find SharePoint. You'll find a rather clunky interface for
building validation rules. But the question is, how do you tie all of this
together into a mental model?
Here's my advice: forget all the bells and whistles. Oh, sure, they're
useful; but like any other Microsoft team, the InfoPath folks tried to cram
everything into the box that was remotely related to their core purpose. And
what is that core purpose? Here's my one-sentence summary: InfoPath is a tool
that lets end users create XML files matching a particular schema without ever
seeing an angle bracket. Really, that's the basic idea here. XML is, as you've
no doubt been told far too many times, a standard for data interchange between
just about everything these days. InfoPath lets you as developer specify an XML
schema, and then turn users loose to make XML files matching that schema. It's
then up to you to do something with them.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.