Clemens Vasters and Don have been talking about InfoPath (formerly XDocs), a new tool for working with XML. It sounds awesome, not least because I'm building something at work that I could have built with this in about a tenth the time. Well, the Office 11 beta goes public in about a month, so it shouldn't be long before I can get my hands on it. Some features, via Clemens's blog:
- When you design a form based on an XML Schema, and fill out that form later, the document that you'll save will be a pure XML document instance of the exact underlying schema, without any other goo. InfoPath will only associate the instance with itself by injecting a processing instruction.
- InfoPath understands XML Schema type restrictions, validates them and gives you red frames on fields that are wrong. It spell-checks and gives you red squiggles for misspelled words. It gives you repeating edit regions for arrays of complex types. It gives you date pickers for dates. It gives you combo-boxes for enums.
- When you "export" a form template (whose native storage format is, inexplicably, binary), you will find an XSLT innocently hanging out in your output directory. That stylesheet is capable of rendering an XML instance of the underlying schema to a proper DHTML page that is visually (and functionally) equivalent to the form you've designed.
- You can submit a filled out form to a file or to a web service; however, most importantly, you can submit to a Windows Scripting Host script (JScript/VBScript). Which means that you could smuggle (for instance) a COM/Interopped managed pipeline underneath it (think WSE) that will wrap the payload into an envelope and add all the current and essential web services stuff to it. Or you could submit to a disconnected message queue on a client and have a server do the processing for forwarding your data into a service-oriented bus. Or you could drop stuff into BizTalk.
