Email Submit "To" line (loops in formulas)
Everyone likes InfoPath's email data connection because it lets you collect forms using email only, no other infrastructure required (no need for Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server, or even a file share). We've built even more Outlook integration in InfoPath 2007 Beta, but since most of you don't have that yet, let me share a tip that will work in both InfoPath 2003 and 2007.
The basics: Single dynamic email address
As your probably know, the To and CC line of the email data connection can come from a textbox in the form by using a formula. To do that, just use the Fx button next to the To line in the data connection wizard:
The trick: Multiple email addresses from repeating controls
Some forms have a list of names they want to send to, but the simple formula above won't work for that.
For example, consider a repeating table that looks like this:
With this data source (note that "person" is repeating):
So you want to produce this semicolon-separated list of e-mails:
A good instinct is to use the "concat" function, but unfortunately that only works on the first element in a repeating structure.
So then comes the team insight: O
ur "eval" function returns a list of nodes which actually share an anonymous parent. That means you can use one eval functions to create a list of the email addresses, then wrap it in another eval function that gets the parent of that list.
Voila, here's the formula to solve the problem:
eval(eval(person, "concat(my:email, ';')"), "..")
(Note that "person" can be inserted from the data source, but "my:email" needs to be typed by hand or you'll get an error.)
For the curious: Here's how it's done
Let's break down that XPath formula from the inside out:
-
"concat(my:email, ';')" - Adds a semicolon to each email address.
-
eval(person, "concat(my:email, ';')") - Loops through each person to create a list of email addresses
-
eval(eval(person, "concat(my:email, ';')"), "..") - Gets the anonymous parent of the email addresses, and converts them to a string.
So the end result returns the contents of that anonymous parent, which is a series of semicolon-delimited email addresses. Phew!
In summary
We are using two tricks here:
- The fields returned by eval() all have the same anonymous parent (feature of InfoPath's function)
- The string value of a parent is the concatenation of all its children (W3C spec’ed)
- David Airapetyan (Software Design Engineer) and
Ned
