Open your rolodex from InfoPath using the Contact Selector

Speaking of Outlook integration, Microsoft Office 2007 includes a new control that enables you to choose one or more e-mail address from the address book.

You can add this control to InfoPath’s list of custom controls by using the Add or Remove Custom Controls wizard like you would for any other ActiveX control.  When registering the control, you can choose most of the default options. However, you must choose "Field or Group (any data type)" in the "Specify Data Type Options" page of the wizard. If you don't choose this binding type, the control will be disabled when you try to fill out the form.

When you insert this control in a form template, it looks like this:

When you insert this control in design mode, only a group node is added to the data source. You must manually add additional fields in order for this control to work correctly. To determine the final data structure should be, open the properties dialog for the control and click on the "Items" tab. This tab lists the schema structure that is required.

As I mentioned, you must manually add these fields to the data source. This can be quite painful if you want to use the control in a lot of form templates. However, here’s a little trick.  You can create a Template Part that contains only the data structure and no controls in the view. Now, when you need to use the Contact Selector, first insert the Template Part to create the data structure.  (This will insert an empty Section control into the view which you can then remove.)  Then, go to the data source, right-click on the group node that was inserted, and select Contact Selector from the More menu.

Template Parts don't support ActiveX controls so you can't insert the Contact Selector into the template part which would make this even easier. However, using this empty template part that contains only the data structure is still easier than creating the structure from scratch each time.
 
Scott Roberts
Senior Development Lead