Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

1040 Part X: Microsoft Office 2003 Integration with SharePoint Products and Technologies
contain and organize the fields; the data source is made up of fields and groups. The
controls on the form are bound to the fields and groups in the data source, and this
binding allows data entered into a control to be saved. Information entered into a
bound control is saved in the field it is associated with. InfoPath supports the following
data sources: XML documents, Extensible Schema Definition (XSD) schemas,
databases (Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access), and XML Web services. When
you design a form, InfoPath Data Source Setup Wizard prompts you to select the
type of data source you want to use. Regardless of the type of data source you ultimately
decide to use in your project, InfoPath reads the available metadata from the
data source and displays it in the Data Source view, as shown in Figure 39-3. You
can then drag data source fields onto the form as you are designing it, providing a
binding between the data source fields and the form controls.
F39XR03
Figure 39-3 Form data source
The programming environment for InfoPath is Microsoft Script Editor (MSE).
Microsoft JScript and Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) are the programming
languages used in MSE to design custom business logic for a form.
The InfoPath object model can be used to interact with the application, its
forms, and data that the form contains. The object model also contains properties
that can be used to return references to the XML Document Object Model (DOM).
The DOM interacts with XML documents (or files) that are used in an InfoPath form,
including the XML data that an InfoPath form produces.
All form templates are composed of several individual form files. These files
ensure that when users fill out a form based on a form template, it opens, displays,
and functions properly. InfoPath form templates include the following files: form
definition file (XSF), XML Schemas, XML templates, and view, presentation, script,
and custom business logic files. Table 39-1 describes these files and lists their
extensions.