Infopath Repeating section as Columns

L

Lostwave

I have been having a heck of a time with this.
I am an experienced developer, but don't have much knowledge with SPS
and Infopath.

Here's the skinny:
Infopath form with several fields which submits to Sharepoint Portal
Server. The purpose of the form is to track prospective sales leads.
There is one repeating section for services type, which has Service and
Amount. There can be 0 to many services each with its own dollar
amount. The services field is a dropdown populated from a SQL Server.
The Amounts field is currency entered by the user.

Here is an abbreviated version of the xml created:
<my:myFields>
<my:prospectName>Bla</my:prospectName>
<my:Competition>none</my:Competition>
<my:probability>0.80</my:probability>
<my:ContactDate>2005-01-10</my:ContactDate>
<my:Status>Lead</my:Status>
<my:ClosedState></my:ClosedState>
<my:Amounts>
<my:Service>Employee Benefit Plan</my:Service>
<my:Amount>100</my:Amount>
</my:Amounts>
<my:Amounts>
<my:Service>Estate &amp; Gift</my:Service>
<my:Amount>200</my:Amount>
</my:Amounts>
<my:Amounts>
<my:Service>General Accounting</my:Service>
<my:Amount>300</my:Amount>
</my:Amounts>
<my:Amounts>
<my:Service>General Tax</my:Service>
<my:Amount>400</my:Amount>
</my:Amounts>
</my:myFields>

I left out a bunch of fields, but you get the idea.

This all works nearly perfectly. User can open new/existing data into
InfoPath. Edit items. Save it to SPS.

One problem is the repeated section can't be listed as a column, so it
just merges the Services together and sums the Amounts... this isn't
ideal, but it works.

Now the main problem.
I need to make a report which will show a list of all prospects.
The columns need to be the prospect name, followed by all possible
services, and a total.

There are no requirements on how this report should be built, but I
can't for the life of me get it to work. I have tried a million
different things.

I tried getting the files from an SPS data connection. I was able to
view all the metadata, but not the actual files. The metadata just has
the merged services field, not each one separate.
AND, Even if I was able to get the files, I can't figure out how to
make a SQL repeating datasource list out for columns.

I tried getting the files using the lists web service, but that seemed
to only return the same metadata.

I tried to do it all with script. I was able to load all the files
into an XML Document. I was also able to load all the Services into an
XML Document. But I can't for the life of me figure out how to
programatically write HTML to the page. This seems to me like the best
solution at this point, if I can just figure out how to
document.write("<table><TR><TD>")

I even started writing a web part to deal with it, but I don't know
enough about SPS to do this quickly, and didn't want to go down that
road until I find out there is no easier way.

Anyone have any ideas for me? I have spent days on this to no avail.
I could have written this entire form thing with reports in ASP.NET/SQL
in much less time than I have spent trying to deal with the time saving
InfoPath.

Thanks so much for reading this,
Justin.
 

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