Info. Path Clever. WorkaroundsNote It appears that Share. Point magazine has bitten the dust and with it went my old series on the tribute to the humble leave form. I am still getting requests to a finish it and b republish it. So I am reposting it to here on cleverworkarounds. If you have not seen this before, bear in mind it was first published in 2. Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' title='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' />Hi all. Welcome to edition 7 of this seemingly never ending tribute to the humble annual leave vacation form. This is getting to be like the Friday the 1. First up, I want to categorically state that, as a heterosexual Australian male, I have a few stereotypical personality traits. I enjoy beer, kung fu movies, Burger Rings, Vegemite and Tim Tams, love the cricket especially playing India and most importantly of all, I do not read instructions. Period. I think that ignoring the RTFM rule is a characteristic of all of humanity but Australians in particular seem to celebrate this trait as something endearing. Therefore, it pains me greatly to have to inform you that this seventh edition of the series is one of those posts where you have to put on the brakes and explain some really boring conceptual stuff to proceed with the rest of the series. Yeah, I know theory is boring and sucky and you just wanna get into the nuts and bolts of it all. But, as Homer demonstrates below, sometimes we have to defy our genetic programming and actually read the instructions. The alternative is a Share. Point solution equivalent to that of Homers BBQ. This post will deal with some of the mechanics of form submission and form publishing. What has gone beforeThe first few posts in this series are starting to get hazy it seems so long ago now. To sum it all up in a nutshell, we introduced the leave form as a means to introduce a lot of key Share. Point features in an easy to understand and relevant way. We set several requirements that we had to achieve. Automatic identification of requestor. Reduce data entry. Validation of dates, specifically the automatic calculation of days absent excluding weekendsMr Burns is not the only approver, we will need the workflow to route the leave approval to the right supervisor. We have a central leave calendar to update. At the end of part 6 we were working on validation of dates. We added some validation rules to ensure that you could not return to work before you started your leave of absence. But at the end of that post, I showed how a published form did not obey our data validation rule, where the form was set to prohibit incorrect dates, yet I was able to click save and put the form straight into the document library. InfoPath-Inside-Viewer_4.png' alt='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' title='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' />What the Why did this occur Saving vs Submitting form confusion. Like everything else designed by nerdy engineers, Info. Path and Forms Services can be used in a few different ways. This offers flexibility of course, but has the disadvantage that if the flexibility is not well understood i. Homer is a classic case of a person who, when faced with two choices, will always pick the wrong one. You have to remember that Info. Path started out as a program installed onto your PC, along with other MSOffice applications. Thus, historically, an Info. Path form is just another type of document. In its simplest and default scenario, the form is very much like any other MSOffice document in that you createopen the form, edit it and then save it. Help for all Office apps. Set up your Office 365 subscription. Find howto articles and video tutorials. Contact our Answer Techs for assisted support. Techyv-Images/Microsoft-Office-Professional-2010-Visual-Studio-Tools-for-Applications.jpeg' alt='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' title='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' />But hang on a second Most of the time, the data collected in the form is part of a larger business process. Also most of the time, business process needs to do stuff with the information that the user has entered. In other words, the data usually doesnt stay in the forms that users fill out. So the Info. Path designers, wanting to please everybody, designed Info. Path in such a way that saving a form and submitting a form are two different things. Homer Simpson doesnt care about this nor should he. Download Classic Menu for Office 2007, 2010, 2013, and Other Product Lines. Classic Menu for Office 20 Suites Classic Menu for Office 20. Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' title='Office Infopath 2007 Free Download' />He just wants to fill out the form so he can go back to dreaming about the land of chocolate. Here is the key thing you need to know, though. Saving a form is, in effect, performed on the presumption that the form is still a work in progress. Saving the form should be thought about in the same way you would save a word document after performing some edits. Because the form is still a work in progress, data validation should not take place. But at some point the form stops being a document and becomeswell a form It is complete and no more edits should be made. This is when you actually submit the form Submitting a form triggers the data validation rules that were set up in part 6. Big dealWhen does this get hard, PaulOkay, so you may not think that there is really that much of a drama with the whole save vs submit thing. But when Info. Path is integrated with Share. Point via Forms Services, it can get complicated. You see, Info. Path allows you to create forms that submit their data to one or more locations. For example, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant leave form could be set up so that when Homer submits his application, the data is sent to a database, and a copy of each completed form is also sent in an e mail message to Waylon Smithers and Monty Burns. For reference, here are the places that Info. Path can submit to A Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server database. A Web service. A server running Microsoft Windows Share. Point Services. In an e mail message. An application on a Web server. A custom application that hosts Info. Path. Now, given that this series of articles is about Share. Point, which option of the above list do you think we are interested inYou guessed it The third option in the above list is Share. Point. But here is the root cause of the confusion, when you publish an Info. Path form to Share. Point, all forms that you fill in end up being created in a document library. Back in part 4 of this series, we first published the form and as part of that process, created a form library called Leave Forms. Consider the screenshot below. We are about to create a new form in this library. Below is a screenshot of the new form to fill out. Note the toolbar at the top with a Save and Save As options. If you then click Save on the form, it will prompt you to save into the above document library. Therefore, if you use the Save option, the In progress copies of the form are stored in the document library and no data validation has taken place. You really have not submitted the form at all. Does the end user realise this Some might but come onThis is Homer J Simpson we are talking about here So clearly we need to submit this form because in part 6 we added validation rules that need to be checked. But, what the How the hell do I submit Setting up form submission. Real programmer disclaimer Yes I know there are other ways of doing all of this, but remember this series of posts is for beginners. Insyde Software Bios Update. Okay, for now the theory bit is over, and now we get to play with Info. Path again. We are going to add the form submission capability to our existing form so that we can actually submit the form. The thing is, I am also going to removethe Save and Save As options from that toolbar, so that the only action you can make is to submit. Why would I do thisSeveral reasons. It is a simple form and really, you either fill it in and submit or you dont. There really isnt that much of an imperative to save this form, prior to submitting it. When you submit a form, and you are submitting to a Share. Point library, the submitted form is saved.