Filling In Forms Offline

Conventional HTML or XHTML forms require a user to download a form from the network and, using a Web browser, completely fill in the form before submitting it to a server process. This approach can be useful for situations in which the user is already online (and will continue to be online until all the form information has been gathered) and typically has immediate access to all the data needed to allow the form to be submitted successfully.

However, many business scenarios don't conform to these demands of conventional Web forms to be continuously online between downloading the form and completing its submission. For example, a sales representative might visit a client site, or several such sites, during a sales trip and have no ongoing Internet connection during the trip. HTML forms don't get the work done in that scenario. The problems of data collection similar to those mentioned for the safety inspector scenario mentioned in Chapter 1 (in particular, incomplete data and erroneous data) arise again.

InfoPath allows a form to be saved to hard disk after an initial short connection to the network to download a form template. This means that a salesperson, safety inspector, and so on can anticipate what forms will be needed for a business trip and save them to the disk before the trip starts. The InfoPath form(s) can be opened at convenient points during the trip, data can be added to the form, and the form can be saved back to hard disk until a network connection is available. As soon as a convenient network connection is available, the user can submit the completed forms to the server-side business process.

One of the great advantages of InfoPath in this type of scenario is that a form can be saved to disk with incomplete data or no data at all. The computer can be switched off, and data can be added later. The form is filled in at times convenient to the user's business day, not filled in according to an imposed timetable while a network connection is available.

InfoPath's flexibility in response to business situations is also demonstrated in its conditional formatting capabilities.