Guoqiang Wu's Blog : InfoPath

Authoring XML schema (XSD) with InfoPath - Part II

guowu — Fri, 27 May 2005 02:10:23 GMT

Like I mentioned earlier, it is very easy to use InfoPath as an XML schema editor, with very little extra work:

Choose Design a form… from the File Menu in InfoPath.
In the Design a new form task pane, select New Blank Form. Note, if you want to derive a schema from existing XML document or data connection, choose one of the New from… options and skip to step 4) below.
On the Design Tasks pane, click on Data Source to show the Data Source Pane. Right click on the myFields element, you will see a shortcut menu. Starting there, you can create data source structure that models your need.
Once you are done, go to File menu, Extract form files…, then quit InfoPath. Go to the folder you just saved extracted form files, you should find myschema.xsd is what you want. Note: if you are deriving a schema, the schema you want may not be defined directly inside myschema.xsd, but imported there.
(Optional) Open myschema.xsd in your favorite XML or text editor, remove the my namespace auto-generated by InfoPath or replace it with your desired namespace URI.

And that is it!

Have a nice day and thanks for listening to me murmuring!

Authoring XML schema (XSD) with InfoPath - Part I

guowu — Wed, 25 May 2005 02:51:37 GMT

Recently, I ran across Aaron Skonnard's MSDN magazine articles talking about Contract First Service Development. The very first step of this so called "Contract-First" development process is to create the XML schema. And for that, Aaron recommended Visual Studio as one of the XSD editor. This reminds me to mention a frequently overlooked fact that Microsoft InfoPath actually works great as an XSD authoring tool.

The biggest advantage of using InfoPath as an XSD editor is, IMHO, the WYSIWYG user interface:

As the screenshot above shows, you can create, modify and visualize your data structure very easily. It will be a tremendous help if you are not so familiar with XML schema.

The other big, big plus is that InfoPath can derive XML schema for you: provide an xml file, a web service (well, I know this is a little bit redundant, just for the record), or even a database connection, and you are all set!

I hope that is enough to get you interested. Before we move on and talk about how to use InfoPath to create XML schemas, you should also be aware of the con's:

1) This is not an intended functionality of InfoPath. So you will have to do a little extra (very little, I promise) work.

2) Some XSD constructs are not supported by InfoPath. See details in this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_ip2003_ta/html/ODC_INFInfoPathXSD.asp

Ok, next post I will talk in details about how to do this. While on the topic, I'd point out that InfoPath is also great for XSL editing because of the WYSIWYG UI. You will have to clean up all those InfoPath specific styles definition though. My other favorite XSL editor is Microsoft FrontPage 2003: its intellisence extension for XSL is a huge relief, not to mention you also get a rich set of XML editing features.

A simple InfoPath blog editor for .Text - SimpleBlogger

guowu — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:07:00 GMT

About

SimpleBlogger is an InfoPath based blog client utilizing the simpleblogservice API provided by .Text. Main functionalities are:

view current posts;
edit existing posts;
create new posts;
view comments.

Feature highlights

In fact, those mostly are benefits provided by InfoPath. SimpleBlogger does very little.

Standard editing features found in most Microsoft Office products, but not in most existing blog clients, such as: background speller checker, format painter, undo/redo, insert/draw table, line spacing, etc.
Full offline support: imagine writing your blogs on your flight!
XHTML compatible: the post content generated by designer are in XHTML.

System requirements

.Net Framework 1.1
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SP1

[Update 07/27/2004] - Office 2003 SP1 is released.

[Update 07/30/2004] - If you have problem with SP1 install and you had SP1 Preview installed previously, see whether this InfoPath team blog entry could be any help.

Intended users

.Text bloggers.

[Update 05/26/2005] - Community Server users, look here.

Note: if your blog server is a custom build of .Text, SimpleBlogger may or may not work for you, depending on whether the following assumptions are broken:

Assumption made	Result if broken
RSS feed URL = blog URL + "/rss.aspx"	unable to view/edit existing posts
SimpleBlogService URL = blog URL + "/services/simpleblogservice.asmx"	unable to update existing or publish new posts
SimpleBlogService web service is working as expected and there are no modifications to the APIs	same as above
/rss/channel/item/wfw:comment node contains the post entry id	unable to edit existing posts
/rss/channel/item/wfw:commentRss node points to the post comments RSS feed	unable to view comments

Screenshot

Click on the picture to view in full size.

Installation

Download the SimpleBlogger.msi and run it. If you installed SimpleBlogger before, please uninstall it first.

Revision history

Form Version	Release Date	Backward Compatible	Changes (thanks to)
1.0.0.252 (Current)	08/09/2004	Yes	fixed reload categories (G. Andrew Duthie) allow saving credentials with form (G. Andrew Duthie) removed useless links to comment entries
1.0.0.214	08/01/2004	No*	fixed some saving problems minor UI cleanup
1.0.0.156	07/30/2004	No*	removal of validation on username; (G. Andrew Duthie) redesign of post editing; extended schema to allow "managingEditor" elements found in some .Text RSS feeds; (?? and others) improved comments display others...
1.0.0.1	07/20/2004	Yes	Added error handling code for form load, minor UI touch
1.0.0.0	07/19/2004	-	Original release
*This means existing file created with old version of SimpleBlogger may not open once the new version is installed. If you have such file with work-in-progress post entries, try to post them using the old version before installing the new version.

Usage

Open the InfoPath form template from your install location(default: %ProgramFiles%\InfoPath Form Templates\SimpleBlogger.xsn).

Hint: the above is only necessary if you don't have a saved form file (.xml) for your blog. You can always save data for your blogs in a form file and open the form file directly later. This is also how you can do offline blogging.

Support

This is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of this tool is subject to the terms specified in the Terms of Use.

Known issues/Limitations

1) General blogging related functionalities

Symptom: a) when posting a new entry, you can not specify advanced options that are available for the .Text Web Admin page; b) for existing posts, categories information is not shown, thus can't be modified.

Cause: SimpleBlogger relies on the simpleblogservice web service API provided by .Text. It can not do anything more than what simpleblogservice web service can do.

Workaround: None

Status: None until simpleblogservice implements those functionalities or another SOAP based web service is provided.

2) Posts created or modified in other blog client looks weird in SimpleBlogger

Symptom: this may happen when the html source of the post contains mangled html tag like <A><B></A></B>

Cause: SimpleBlogger performs several simple steps to fix up bad HTML code to make them XHTML compatible. The emphasis here is "compatible", not "effective".

Workaround: None

Status: None. Converting HTML to XHTML is too complicate a job for SimpleBlogger to handle it well. As long as you stick to SimpleBlogger, which always generates XHTML compatible post content, this should not be a big concern.

3) Inserted pictures are not shown on the web page

Symptom: Pictures inserted using InfoPath built-in "Insert Picture" feature will show up correctly in SimpleBlogger, but not on the web page.

Cause: By design, InfoPath inserts the actual picture in the xml data by encoding it as a base64 string.

Workaround: In source edit mode, locate and modify the "img" tag created by InfoPath or simply insert the by yourself like this <img src="http://some.website.com/somepicture.jpg" />

Status: I already tried really hard to make this easier but failed. I will try something new later. In the mean time, I would really appreciate if someone discover a way to get the insertion point of the InfoPath Rich text control or text box and share that with me.

4) Unable to paste into post content in design mode

Symptom: this may happen if copying from source external to InfoPath, e.g., a web page.

Cause: investigating

Workaround: Paste into Notepad first.

Status: investigating

5) Font size shown in the web page may not be the same as shown in the design mode of SimpleBlogger

Symptom: this most likely happens with text inside tables.

Cause: investigating

Workaround: it seems like setting the font size 1 point higher or lower than current font size resolves the problem. Hint: you can use CTRL-] or CTRL-[ shortcut key to increase or decrease font size by 1 point.

Status: investigating

That's all I know of. There definitely are more. Please let me know if you find issues with SimpleBlogger, I'd be happy to investigate as long as I have time.

Finally, as always, enjoy blogging!

Layout repeating elements horizontally in InfoPath 2003 SP1

guowu — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 05:51:00 GMT

In InfoPath, you can use repeating tables or repeating sections to display repeating elements. However, those two controls only allow elements to be arranged vertically. To illustrate, assuming the following data is bound to a repeating table:

</myGroup>

The table will look like this:

Name	Value
element1	value1
element2	value2
element3	value3
…	…

If you have a lot of those elements, the table will get very long and look ugly. So you'd want to layout those elements horizontally to better make use of the space available in the view. However, this is hard (if possible) to implement in InfoPath 2003 RTM without significant modification of your data source schema. With the data filtering functionality introduced in InfoPath 2003 SP1, it is a breeze to make the table look like this:

Name	Value
element1	value1
…	…

Name	Value
element2	value2

Name	Value
element3	value3

Here are the steps to achieve the results shown above:

Insert a one-row layout table in the view. The column number should be the number of repeating columns you want to have. In the above example, it should be 3.
Note: For simplicity, I will only talk about repeating table below. You can do similar things with repeating section.
In the first cell of the layout table, insert a repeating table bound to desired data source.
Double click on the repeating table to open the "Repeating Table Properties" dialog; click on the "Display" tab, then click the "Filter data…" button. On the dialog appeared, click on "Add" button to add a filter condition with type of "the expression" and value of "position() mod 3 = 1"(without quote, same below). You probably want to uncheck the "Show filter icon to indicate filtered item" option on the "Repeating Table Properties" dialog after the filter is added.
Now copy the repeating table to the rest of the cells in the layout table inserted in step 1. Follow step 3 above to modify the filter expression according to the column index of the layout table.. For example, the repeating table in the second column should have a filter expression of "position() mod 3 = 2". The last column is special in that the expression there should be "position() mod 3 = 0".
If necessary, choose one of the repeating table to allow "show insert button and hint text", and disable this option on other repeating tables.

That is it! Before you try this out, let me warn you one last thing: you will see a "control stores duplicate data" warning on each of those repeating tables. Not that it is going to cause any problems, as long as you configure the filters correctly.

[Update 07/27/2004] Office 2003 SP1 is released. Removing reference to InfoPath SP1 Preview.

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