Jelle Druyts

InfoPath 2003 is a pretty cool product with lots of potential, but it's obvious that it's still a little young for the real world. Here are some issues I found when developing with InfoPath out-of-the-box:

• You can't make fields required easily if the datasource is a (readonly) webservice since you can't change that definition and you can't set the validation to "cannot be blank" anymore. Apparently, this is by design: "Notice that the Cannot be blank option is disabled; this property is always disabled in the InfoPath user interface when your data source is an external data source". Why is that?
• Publishing is a pain; I just wanted to publish to a website on my local machine and after a lot of head-scratching I found that you actually have to deploy to a network share. The first thing you do is set the directory (the virtual directory on your drive) and then the web url from which the form will be accessible.
• Copying the form to another location - e.g. from develepment to acceptation or production - can't be done easily since the originating location is baked in so you have to redeploy it. Alternatively you could try to script the process to extract the xsn file (which is really just a cab file), update the location and repack it.
• You can't prefill a form with data from a WebService easily, if you don't want the user to click a button first then you'll have to resort to scripting. This looks like a very common scenario though, so I'd expect this to be a lot easier.
• Data binding the controls to the fields can be tedious, a drag & drop mode would be easier.
• There's no support for WSE so I can't use WS-Security; another option would be to use custom SoapHeaders but there's also no support for that.
• There's no password control, so I can't prompt the user for his credentials without having him expose his password to potential neckbreathers.
• It would be nice if InfoPath worked a bit more like ClickOnce: click an xsn in your browser and have the the form open immediately in stead of getting the standard Open/Save dialog. Of course, it's still a cab file so it could be harmful to just allow this without the ClickOnce wonders of .NET security - but it would provide a much more transparant user experience.
• Copy/paste doesn't work between instances of InfoPath, not even for plain text. So it's pretty hard to copy part of an existing form to another one.

Note that this is based on a standard InfoPath 2003 installation, I haven't tried the new InfoPath SP1 Preview yet (which might solve some issues but certainly not all of them).