Chapter 3: Generating XML Forms

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Introduction

XML has become the industry-standard format for data interchange and is the core -enabling technology of InfoPath. One reason XML was successful in gaining industry acceptance is its self-describing nature. Unlike HTML, XML isn t based on a set of predefined tags and data structures. XML documents can contain any type of structured data elements delimited by a set of descriptive tags that act as both the record boundaries and built-in data documentation. When viewed together, the combination of the hierarchical data elements enclosed by descriptive tags defines a vocabulary of data.

The lack of predefined data elements and structure can inherently make XML files unpredictable. Seeing this as a problem, the industry standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), created a new XML-based language for describing these documents. The goal of this specification was to provide a way to describe XML documents and structures, support XML namespaces, promote reusability, enable inheritance, and provide predictability. The result of this was an XML-based vocabulary to describe XML-based vocabularies.

The industry recommendation that describes the structures of this language is broken into three parts : XML Schema Part 0: Primer, XML Schema Part 1: Structures, and XML Schema Part 2: Data Types. Using this standard as the starting point, this chapter covers how you can use InfoPath to develop form-based solutions that provide both data validation and formatting. We will also cover how InfoPath provides an extensible object model that enables developers to programmatically access and control XML-based form data to extend InfoPath solutions.