Comparing InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Forms, Part 2

By Jeremy Sublett

In Comparing InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Forms, Part 2, I discuss forms created with SharePoint Designer.

In Part 1 of this series about forms-based based technologies for SharePoint, I discussed Microsoft Office InfoPath forms (using Forms Services). Now, let's go on and discuss forms created with SharePoint Designer and get a point-by-point comparison of the features of both technologies.

SharePoint Designer, also part of the Microsoft Office suite, is the replacement for FrontPage and has all the capabilities of that tool, plus much more. It also contains all the functionality contained in the Expression Web tool, a popular web-editing tool.

SharePoint Designer is useful for editing files of websites that support FrontPage extensions as well as those websites that are simply file-based. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 are included in this mix, of course.

And since SharePoint is an ASP.NET 2.0 application, we’re often editing things such as CSS style sheets, ASP.NET pages, and ASP.NET master pages. Here are some of the many features of SharePoint Designer:

The process of creating a form in SharePoint Designer is relatively easy. You start by creating a SharePoint list to contain your information, with the columns of data you desire. Then you use SharePoint Designer to create a new .aspx page in your site. This page is used to render the form.

The following set of steps walk you through the process of creating two .aspx pages that replace the standard new and edit forms for a list. These will appear just like the InfoPath form created in Part 1 for the absence request business process, minus some formatting.

1. First you need to create a list to store your form results. Just create a list called Absence Request and add the following columns:

2. Next, in SharePoint Designer, open your SharePoint site. Create a blank .aspx page called NewForm2.aspx in the folder for the list you just created. Note that you could create this .aspx page anywhere, but we’ll keep it here for consistency.

3. Next, enable the Data Source Library task pane from the Task Panes menu. This shows all your data sources, which includes lists, document libraries, XML files, databases, and more. Choose the menu next to the Absence Request list and choose the Show Data command.

4. Choosing the Show Data command will then show you all the columns of the list. Now you’ll select multiple columns and open the drop-down menu above the columns. Choose the New Item Form option to create a form for creating new items in your list.

5. Now you've added a new form to your .aspx page. At this point you have a fully functional form that will save data to the list. You can also format the form, re-order fields, or even attach a master page to it.

6. To make this form show up when you click the New button on your list, you need to right-click the list in the folder listing and choose Properties. Navigate to the Supporting Files tab to choose the new form you created as the new item form.

7. Finally, you might want to control where users are sent after they complete a form. To do this, right-click the Save button of the form. Then choose Form Actions. A dialog box will appear that gives you the ability to direct where users go. Choose Redirect to Source to send the user back from where they came. After this, you can use your form by clicking on the new menu of your list in SharePoint.

8. The steps so far only create a form for adding new items. If you want a custom editing form, you can walk through the same steps above to create EditForm2.aspx in the same place. When creating your form, you would choose the Single Item Form.

9. This is used for rendering a single item in a form view. The single item needs to be selected, however. To do this, you need to pull the ID parameter off the query string. You do this by creating a new parameter and filtering on your list.>

And then the filter...

10. Finally, you must choose this form as the default edit form for the list and change the form action so that it sends users back to where they came from. Once this is done, you have control over the user’s editing experience.

Comparison
Although these two tools can be used in a lot of different ways, I’m only comparing them from the perspective of the absence request scenario used in both of the earlier examples. Here’s the scenario for each tool:

InfoPath forms are being submitted to a SharePoint document library and the form is rendered in a browser.SharePoint Designer forms are submitting items to items in a list. Although a SharePoint list already comes with forms for creating new entries and editing existing entries, these forms are replaced here with custom .aspx pages, described in the steps above.

Here's a table showing the differences in functionality between InfoPath and SharePoint Designer.

Jeremy Sublett is a software architect and senior partner with Composable Systems, LLC, specializing in SharePoint-based business solutions and is a Microsoft SharePoint MVP.