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Is there any way to add additional datasources to an infopath form when using an external list? Infopath always complains about the form not being valid, because of the addinal datasource.

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2 Answers

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If the datasource isn't being used it'll error, why do you want the additional datasource?

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I want to add a dropdown-list to the form, where I want to pull the possible values from a database; in order to ease the fill-out of the form for the user. So I did use the datasource as the source for the dropdownlist; still I got an error. – nyn3x Aug 30 '11 at 20:26
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External list forms does not support additional datasources in InfoPath, and from what I have read its a limitation by design and not some mistake.

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So do you have any hints on how I could create a more user-friendly new/edit form for my external list, where I can pull some lookup-data from another datasource? I already tried customizing the newform.aspx with aspx-markup, but that seems to be not supported as well. Only InfoPath forms are supported when you want to customize the forms for external lists as it seems. – nyn3x Aug 31 '11 at 7:04
Hello, I had the same issue some time ago, but what we did then was using another library and created the InfoPath form from that library and added the external data as datasource. And from a workflow we updated needed fields in the external list based on the input in the form. Don't know if something like this will work in your current solution. Its not something I do everyday, so its possible there is a better solution for the limitations with ect and InfoPath :) – Anders Aune Aug 31 '11 at 9:51
Meanwhile I took another approach: I created a plain-old-HTML-form and made use of the JS COM to write the data back to the external list. This way I have all the freedoms to create my page just as I want to, and to put additional datasources on the page as well. – nyn3x Sep 1 '11 at 7:20

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