Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007

This book is the as detailed and in-depth as a book can be on a technology, that can be put into a book and still be even marginally useful. Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007 covers about every aspect of the technology that you may want to know about. The book starts with a brief introduction to the tool and what its intended purpose. From there it quickly delves off into the details of form creation, starting with the layouts. There is lots of information on most of the important controls, how to use them, format them, and control the advanced aspects, such as default and calculated values, formatting, data binding from external sources. When it comes to controls there is finally some good guidance on rules, validation and internal/declarative logic. There are informative sections on data binding to various sources, mainly xml, Sql Server and SharePoint. There is also detailed treatment of programming the forms. Of particular interest to me was the ability to create forms to be used in a Forms Services context. Using the material in this book I have been able to complete several successful Forms Services implementations. The two criticisms of the book are that 1) in some cases the information is more theoretical than practical and that 2) it may be too much information for a book. An example of number 1 is the explanation of Template Parts. This functionality seems more like a good idea that is not quite adequate for practical applications. There are definitely issues in getting it to work and there is no indication of this in the book. In other words they present it as if you this, this and that and it will all work fine. As to my second criticism, the book pushes the limits of what can be put into a book without it being cluttered and better off referring the reader to the detailed technical documentation. In all I highly recommend this book as a desk reference for the serious InfoPath developer.