best practice for handling offline look-up/reference data

[Ralph Doyle]

Hi

I was wondering if Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) has any examples of or articles on best practice for handling look-up data in InfoPath forms that are intended to be used offline.

The particular scenario in this case is an existing enterprise application built from web services and ASP.NET pages that the client would like to extend to business partners outside the corporate network using online/offline InfoPath forms. It would basically be a service-oriented model with InfoPath form instances as the messages. The reference data will be changing continuously so there we need a mechanism/technique to refresh this data either when the client re-connects to send a form/message or possibly as an entirely separate process in which the client periodically connects to another service which provides a fresh set of reference data.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

 

[Lee Rosenberg [MSFT]]

Ralph,

With the SP1 improvements to the Deployment model, certain offline scenarios
like this become easier. For example, a remote user can 'cache' a template
while online that can be reopened locally while offline. Any data
connections that require the user to be online will not function, but the
user will still be able to edit data within the form. InfoPath SP1 keeps
all of the 'cached' templates local and displays them in the Fill Out a Form
dialog (File | Fill Out a Form) for future use. This was not possible with
the original v1 release.

Lee