At Pilothouse, we do a lot of SharePoint Training, but in the course of a week long class there isn’t as much time to cover some of the topics as in-depth as we would like.

This is the first of a series of posts that will discuss many aspects of custom form creation with InfoPath. Here we’re giving a brief introduction to the what and some of the why behind these customizations, and in the next parts we will be digging a bit deeper to learn more about what you can and cannot do with this tool.

As with most things in SharePoint, some seemingly difficult things will become trivial, and some seemingly trivial things will become difficult or impractical. I don’t say impossible because when you know as much as some of us do about the product you can come up with custom-coded solutions to many of those impossible cases, but impractical is a fair term to throw around.

InfoPath List and Library

New in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to customize list forms with InfoPath Form Designer 2010. In SharePoint 2007 it was only possible to collect data from these forms with a form library (if you know how to get InfoPath form data into normal lists in SharePoint 2007 without custom code feel free to post your tricks – there are a few ways).

One of many issues with a form library is that it is not an actual list, but a document library. One implication is that you cannot set the item level permissions for the entire list to “view only your own items.” For surveys or other data collection tasks that would prefer individual data to not be shared with others, this was problematic. Yes, you could write a custom event receiver to change permissions on new items that have been added, but at the point where you want to start allowing modifications you have to think a little harder about what the receivers are doing and theoretically have more than one working in concert.

The first parts of this series will be addressing the following questions:

  • When to use a list form vs a form library
  • Differences in available controls between the two types of InfoPath forms
  • Having different custom Edit, New, and View forms for the same list
After that we will be addressing anything that comes up in comments or going free form with some tasks that could be completed with. At any rate, if you either like to or need to use InfoPath to create custom list forms, stay tuned to our next installments.