Improvements to Share Point integration - Property demotion

One of the new features in InfoPath 2007 when publishing to a SharePoint 2007 server is the ability to turn on property demotion.

Property demotion is the ability to be able to modify fields that show up in SharePoint document libraries and cause those fields to be automatically updated in the underlying document (in this case InfoPath form).

Where would you use demotion?

Imagine you have a document library where you save your company assets as InfoPath forms. Let us say one of the fields in the library, is the current owner of this asset. When you need to bulk assign a bunch of assets from one person to another, wouldn't it be really easy if you can just update this field in a data grid view instead of opening each and every asset form and having to update it.

Let us see how you can enable property demotion

When you go through the publish wizard (File/Publish) pages for publishing to SharePoint, InfoPath will detect if the server is 2007 and if it finds that to be true, you will now be able to turn on property demotion for a field by selecting the check box as shown in the image below.

Note that not all data types can be demoted and also fields that are within a repeating context cannot be demoted. For data types that don't allow demotion, the checkbox will automatically be disabled.

Once you enable certain fields for demotion, they become available in SharePoint's data grid view to be edited. The data grid view can be accessed from SharePoint library using the Actions menu as shown below.

Also since demotion happens on SharePoint side (when the field is edited), the form's business logic such as Data Validation, Rules, Formulas, Code and Script will not run at that time. So there may be situations when you do not want to turn on demotion for certain fields.

Hope you find this helpful and look forward to see you turning on demotion.

Thanks,

Anand

Lead Software Development Engineer