I think the only real pain point I've seen is trying to support SP1 and
non-SP1 InfoPath in an organization at the same time. As long as everyone
has SP1, you won't have to miss out on all those cool features, or have to
worry about how to deploy forms with and without.
I've done several fairly complex forms applications with InfoPath, and to be
perfectly honest, I haven't yet run into a problem that couldn't be solved
(once I understood it). And there's a ton of stuff I can't wait to try yet.
It's one of the most amazing developments to come out of the Office team
that I've seen.
There are one or two "limitations" that are annoying, but not show-stopping.
It would be nice if InfoPath had some way of including external JScript
files...for example the common.js file in the SDK has some handy functions,
and I've developed quite a few of my own. But these have to be pasted into
the built-in script (at least according to the "instructions"). The only
solution, if you want to avoid cut-and-paste inheritance, is to implement
common functions in some sort of web service. But this gets complicated
when all you want is a script library, and it also requires the user be
online. Every single one of my enterprise-wide forms uses the same basic
script to a point. It sure would be nice to have that in a single location,
even if I still had to run makecab.exe or something to package it into all
the forms in my FormsLibrary.
I guess it would be nice to be able to access the clipboard
programmatically...There may be a way, but I haven't found it yet. I think
this is because the window object in InfoPath isn't the same thing as the IE
window object. I think I might have extended the IE window object for
InfoPath's use (to support things like Activate, and the XDocument property)
by using object.prototype. That way, a window is still a window, but it's
also an InfoPath window. There may be technical reasons why this can't be
done.
I understand the hesitation to commit to a 1.0 release of anything...there
must be bugs in there somewhere, but so far I haven't run into any real
scary ones.
Regards,
Mike Sharp
