I recently found an excellent series of posts that describe how to customise the UI in Scarepoint.

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/category/sharepoint/

There's a LOT of other useful stuff in this blog - regular reading I think.

I was commenting the other day at the office that 3 months ago, no-one was doing anything with SharePoint and now there are five of us.  Sadly, I am one of them :(

As per previous posts I tend to either love or hate SharePoint.  The cycle of mixed emotions is continuous and ever increasing in velocity.  Fairly soon, it will be a blur and I will feel either suicidal or manically happy.

However, over the last month or so I have learnt a lot about MOSS, InfoPath, Forms Services, Workflow and other related stuff.  This is the project:

1. MOSS is exposed to the Internet and the UI is customised with SharePoint Designer so it looks half decent.
2. User logs into site - site is configured with custom membership and role providers that uses a SQL database.  The database contains data from MS CRM and other stuff.  Someone else in the office has created a membership provider that talks directly the the MS CRM web services but in this case we didn't want to do this - the customer does not have the CRM Internet connector license.
3. User browses the site and clicks a button to view an InfoPath form in the browser.
4. The form displays data from web services and lists. 
5. User can save a draft of the form or submit it.  The form is submitted to a form library in SharePoint.
6. A workflow attached to the form library sends the form's xml via a custom Workflow Activity to a web service.
7. The Web Service inserts the XML into a Word DOCX file and emails the file to a couple of address.

Along the way, I've discovered a few things so I thought it was about time I documented and shared a few tips.

Today's tip follows...

Another Code Camp bites the dust. 

Things that went well:

• Great speakers and topics.  It never ceases to amaze me that these guys will give up their precious weekend and pay for themselves to travel all over the country to speak at community events like this. 
• Attendance.  This was the first 'mainland' Code Camp so our expectation were not high for a huge audience, but I was very please with the turn out.  We had 130 registrations and only 20-ish no-shows.  Anything less than 20% for a free event is pretty fantastic I think.  I also expected a lot less attendees on Sunday, but most suck around and were rewarded with some great sessions.
• Catering.  Subway was a big hit and the cost was very competitive - much cheaper than anything else we have used before.
• Volunteers.  I spent most of the weekend listening to speakers and making sure everything was running sweetly.  I had plenty of time to relax thanks to the fantastic job done by a great bunch of volunteers.  Thanks again to Dan, Bryn, Chris C, Chris F, Simeon, Dave & Gary.
• Weather.  Despite predictions of rain, the weather was lovely.

Things that went badly:

• Only thing I can think of - we ran out of milk late on Saturday :)

So, on balance, I think that was pretty successful!  I think a repeat next year will be possible - but I don't want to think about that just yet.

JB & JD are up on Channel 9, talking about MindScape and Lightspeed with Ron Jacobs.

Maybe I'm mistaken but it seems like there are a lot more Kiwi's doing great things with software and getting noticed more often.

I'm not a very good googler.  Others in the office seem to find the right answer quickly when I can spend an hour searching and not finding what I want. Today I spend 2 hours trying to solve this problem.

When you have a secondary data source that uses a web service, InfoPath lets you specify the input parameters.

You can set the value here to any simple data type.  However, it's not immediately apparent how you would set the value to a variable data item.  In this case I wanted to fetch some data for the currently logged in user.  This data is then used to pre-populate the form.

InfoPath has a username() function.  To use this to specify the value to the web service you need to create a rule for the Form.

1. Select Tools/Form Options.
2. Select Open and Save.
3. Click Rules.
4. Add a new rule.
5. Add an action to set a field value.
6. For the field, select your web service as the data source and the input parameter you want to set.
7. Set the value to a function or some other calculated value.
8. Add more actions if you have more input parameters.
9. Add a final rule to submit the query for the web service.

Ensure that the data connection for the web service has the "Automatically retrieve data when form is opened" option turned off.

The complete instructions for this were located here.