Dashboards display just-in-time data – at a glance you can see how fast your process is moving and whether resource shifting is required. SharePoint makes dashboards easy and you can create them in many different ways. But, there’s a gap in the out-of-box story for displaying InfoPath data: you can only promote fields that are not repeating, but reporting is mostly about repeating data – i.e. the data in your forms isn’t flat. How are you going to display repeating data from your InfoPath forms on your dashboards?
This post summarizes the various solutions and provides links to learn more.
Out-of-box Solutions
SharePoint comes with several options for power users:
- Submit repeating items from an InfoPath form using CAML and pull data in InfoPath Dashboard
- Pros: no code
- Cons: very tricky to setup and understand, specific to list – if list changes, updating is costly
- How-to links:
- Write your own custom code to submit data to SharePoint list
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- Pros: set up complex mappings
- Cons: developer needed and likely a brittle solution not flexible when things change
- How-to links:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162745.aspx
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7613058/submitting-repeating-infopath-table-to-sharepoint-list-in-browser-enabled-form
- http://jaliyaudagedara.blogspot.com/2011/03/submitting-data-to-sharepoint-2010-list.html
- http://blog-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/07/infopath-update-repeating-elementsnodes.html
More Flexible
To reduce cost, complexity and enable flex when your form’s data changes, you’ll want to look beyond hardcoded solutions that are not dynamic:
- Use Qdabra’s qRules to map repeating form data to lists and pull from Dashboard
- Pros: no code, complex mapping support
- Cons: need to buy a license, but it’s inexpensive; browser forms require enabling sandbox
- How-to link:
More Scalable
For the most scalable solution – when you have tens of thousands of rows, you need to go beyond the storage limitations of SharePoint and push your data to SQL. You can still display the data on your Dashboard, but it resides in SQL.
- Use Qdabra’s DBXL Web Service to map repeating form data to SQL database
- Pros:
- No code, flexible when things change;
- No list mapping needed – scales to millions of items
- Powerful filtering and query tool
- Cons: requires server install of product
- How-to link:
- Pros:
Learn More
Qdabra offers short video tutorials and in depth how-to hands-on-labs. Check out the following links:
- YouTube Video highlighting the above techniques:
- Qdabra Toolkit includes detailed how-to instructions and sample templates:
