Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 Kick Start

Design Mode ”Your Toolset

Form developers will spend much of their time either in design mode in the main InfoPath client or in the Microsoft Script Editor, which is described in Chapter 17, "Scripting in InfoPath."

When the InfoPath client is in design mode, the options offered on some menus change. For example, the option to open the Microsoft Script Editor is available only when you are in design mode. Additional task panes are also made available when the InfoPath client is in design mode. Task panes are described in detail later in this chapter.

Designing a View

There are several ways of creating the layout and content of a view in InfoPath. You saw in Chapter 1 how the Query view can be created automatically when the Data Source Setup Wizard is used. You have the option to accept the automatically created view, as we did in Chapter 1, or you can customize the layout by, for example, adding a company logo.

You saw another option of view design when we created the Data Entry view in Chapter 1. A data source already exists with field names derived from a relational database or other source chosen in the Data Source Setup Wizard. In this situation, you can simply drag form controls onto the form area and an appropriate label is automatically created. In a production form template, you would likely pay much more attention to layout than we did in Chapter 1. Layout is discussed in detail in Chapter 6, "Designing Visual Aspects of InfoPath Forms."

Another option that might be useful when designing a prototype form or when designing a form that will rely on scripting code rather than, say, the Data Source Setup Wizard, is to create a layout from scratch. You can drag form controls from the Controls task pane onto the form area, and as you do so, corresponding fields are created in the data source. In this scenario, you will need to type text in the form area to create labels for form controls you add to the form area. You will likely also want to edit the default field names, such as field1 , to make them more meaningful.

Whatever technique you choose to create a view, you should test it using the preview option.

Previewing a Form Template

During the development of a form template, you might want to test the functionality of the form template at various stages. In design mode, the Standard toolbar contains a button labeled Preview Form. Clicking this button opens the form template in a new window in a mode that resembles form-filling mode. An alternate way to preview a form template is to press either Alt+P or Ctrl+Shift+B.

In the Preview window, a Close Preview button is offered in the Standard toolbar that, not surprisingly, closes the InfoPath preview window. The keyboard shortcut to close the Preview window is Alt+C. The Close Preview button is not present when you use the normal form-filling mode. However, in preview mode, you can test the functionality of a view by, for example, querying a database or adding new data to a database.