Introducing Microsoft® Office InfoPath™ 2003

Creating Secondary Data Sources for List Boxes

The secondary data sources you created to populate drop-down lists in the section “Using Secondary Data Sources with Lists,” in Chapter 6, rely on static XML documents. Updating these documents isn’t easy, especially if they’re embedded in the template’s .xsn file. InfoPath’s Data Connection Wizard lets you create dynamic secondary data sources that reflect the current values in the underlying table. The only drawback to this approach is that InfoPath must download and cache the secondary data source’s rows when you open the form. If your form has several list boxes with many items, opening the form can be delayed by a few seconds or more, depending on the speed of the database connection and the ...