9.1. Forms on steroids Whether on paper or electronic, forms are the dominant form of business transaction record where humans are involved. That's because a well-designed form provides the guidance and constraints that help you get the data entry right. guidance A form guides you by providing a separate space for each piece of information, with the appropriate granularity (e.g. one address field, or separate fields for street, city, and state). constraints A form can constrain the length of each field (perhaps with a box for each character), or limit data values to items checked off from a printed list. But these strengths of traditional forms – guided entry and constrained data values – can be weaknesses as well. InfoPath improves on conventional forms software in several ways: -
InfoPath guides data entry based on a schema of the form designer's choosing. It will even help you create a schema. -
InfoPath enforces the constraints of the schema, plus additional constraints that the form designer can specify. -
The user is actually creating an abstract XML document while completing the form, although he only sees the rendered form view. The experience is similar to other Office products. -
The user can add and delete repeating elements, or even groups of repeating elements. The form view expands and contracts as needed. -
There can be multiple form views for a single document type. The layout of the fields in the form views does not have to follow the order in the underlying XML document. -
The form can have XHTML rich text elements, with lists, highlighted phrases, etc. |