SharePoint List, Repeating Table

Question

I've got what I think is a simple problem and I've read lots and lots of articles and help but it is no clearer in my mind. It is so obvious an application of SharePoint+InfoPath that there must be an easy way (I hope).

In InfoPath 2007 (not browser compatible) I want to do the following:

My Form gets a course code from the user (held in data source Main -> myFields ->Course_Code
I have a SharePoint list that contains
- Course Code
- Description

I want to display as a repeating list or something similar those records where Course_Code matches, and next to each row I want the user to enter a Quantity.

So it should look like (for Course_Code=abc):

Course Code                  Description                             Quantity
abc                                The abc course                            0
abc                                The longer abc course                  0
abc                                abc course refresher                    6

where the user fills in the quantity.
                               
Having done all that I want to save the resulting InfoPath form in a way that will make the link between Course_Code, Description and Quantity to be intelligible to SharePoint workflow.

Parts of this look easy but I can't see the whole solution.

Your advice gratefully received!

Answer 1

Are there any specific aspects of this app that you are having issues with?  Have you successfully created the repeating table?
I think that exposing the repeating table data to the workflow is going to require deserializing the form data inside your workflow.  I don't know if it can be done using SPD so can't say that it's impossible with SPD but I suspect you'll need to do this in Visual Studio.

Answer 2

Thanks EVC.

I have solved my own problem as specified above. No I did not need to use VS. You are right in saying that parsing the serialised output can't be done in SPD, but calculated fields are your friend :-)

Answer 3

I want to do something very similar,  we have a infopath form and I want to add a category and quantity field.   I would like to be able to use these fields in a SharePoint list,  but all the rows of data in SP get compiled into 1 cell.

Example in infopath:

categorya  1

categoryb 5

categoryc 5

In SharePoint,  I want to be able to use this data to make some reporting views.

But sharepoint stores it as Categorya, categoryb, categoryc in one cell and 1, 5, 4 in another cell.

Anyone know how to make it so it I can use this data in some reports?