Intro–InfoPath 2010 Form Design with C# Code-Behind (Part 1 of 2)

Last week I had to create my first InfoPath 2010 form with code-behind for some custom business logic (as the business requirements were explained to me it quickly became apparent that “Rules” available in InfoPath weren’t going to be sufficient).

InfoPath is admittedly not a strong suit for me.  The small amount of interaction I had with it in IP 2007 and MOSS 2007 left me with a feeling that it wasn’t quite ready for prime-time, so I largely ignored it.

I have a new respect though for the most recent incarnation.  InfoPath 2010 is an incredibly powerful tool as I’ve learned.  Here’s Part 1 of a brief 2-part blog post describing how I went about implementing some custom business logic – including data access to a SQL 2008 R2 database – with custom C# code behind an InfoPath 2010 form, rendered as a browser form in SharePoint 2010.

Master “Roll-Up” Calendar in SharePoint 2007

This post simply references a video I recorded for a customer.  I was asked to build and demonstrate one approach to consolidating six calendars that were maintained independently across the organization into SharePoint 2007.  Some were updated simply by making changes to static HTML pages, while others were served up by a variety of application servers (classic ASP, Rails, PHP, etc.).

The premise of my solution was that all these individual calendars needed to be migrated to SharePoint, since that was a large organizational objective anyway.  Once that was done, a “master calendar” would be created in SharePoint, and a custom event handler would be written in C# so that create, update, and delete events in any of the six “child” calendars would be synchronized to the “master” calendar. 

http://www.screencast.com/users/JonSchultz/folders/Default/media/2663912c-23d0-4eb3-871e-91889baf0681

Caveat:  I realize that most of these stated requirements could have been achieved with some combination of either custom views or perhaps content types.  However, I was also instructed that our solution needed to connect to Outlook, Entourage, and essentially any other RSS reader our customer might choose to use.  The organization has a large percentage of Mac users, and after testing a few approaches using views and content types, we found a simple custom event receiver to be more reliable when serving the content across such a wide variety of consumer applications. 

Jonathon Schultz
mobile: 407.923.4946 | fax: 866.569.2615 | email: jon@jonschultz.com