So I’ve been using InfoPath as a development tool for a couple of months now. So here’s the top 5 things that annoy me about infopath 2003, or that i haven’t found an easy answer for.
1. Regeneration of template/sampledata.xml – If you add new nodes into your form xsd file there’s no easy way to get them added to your template.xml or your sampledata.xml. The only sure way to ensure they’re there is to add them manually which of course if very tedioius.
2. No common rule definiton -if you use the same rule on more than 1 control on the infopath form, you have to create it from scratch (unless you know how to hack the manifest file).
3. No Common Controls – If you use the same combination of controls (e.g. Suburb ddl, state ddl and postcode text box) in a lot of places, no easy way just to make it a common control.
4. No section footers – As it’s very Word like, you’d expect it to behave like Word. There’s no way to have a page header/footer on a section, only for the whole of the document.
5. No batch publishing – Doesn’t seem to be an easy way to publish a bunch of forms to a web server in a batch (or using a batch file to publish)