Groove Forms and Groove InfoPath Forms Part 1: Data Storage
I've had a few conversations lately with solutions developers about the Groove InfoPath Forms tool, and one of the first questions that comes up is how to decide when to use the Groove Forms tool and when to use the InfoPath Forms tool.
In order to understand the tradeoffs, it helps to understand the differences in the underlying data storage used by the two tools.
Tool Versions
Before I get into that, though, we need to talk about tool versions. Groove 2007 ships with several versions of the Forms tool, and one version of the InfoPath Forms tool. The default version of the Forms tool that gets created when you add a new Groove Forms tool using Groove 2007 is the V5 Forms tool; older versions are included for compatibility with pre-2007 spaces. The Groove InfoPath Forms tool is new, and thus is a V1 tool. In this blog series I'm going to focus on the Forms V5 tool and the InfoPath Forms V1 tool.
Data Storage
Both tools use the Groove "Record Database Manager" to store user data. The Forms tool uses a record schema that is created at form design time, and each form in the tool has it's own record schema. The Groove InfoPath tool is a variant of the Groove Forms tool that uses an InfoPath solution for the form design, and the InfoPath editor control for form editing and preview. Since InfoPath generates XML documents, the Groove InfoPath Forms tool needs to store an XML document somewhere in the underlying Record Database Manager record.
To do this, when you import an InfoPath form into the the Groove InfoPath Forms tool, it creates a record schema for that form that contains a field for each promoted field in the InfoPath form, and a single attachment field that is used to store the corresponding InfoPath XML document. When a new InfoPath form is saved in Groove, the promoted fields are extracted from the XML document and stored in the promoted fields in the data record, and the entire InfoPath document is stored in the attachment field. Any field that is not promoted is represented only within the InfoPath document.
Next time, I'll talk about some other differences between the two tools, which will help get us ready to take on the original topic of how to choose between the two alternatives.
