Reporting against a form library

Question

I have two InfoPath forms published to form libraries. one is a Time off request and the other is an expense report with repeating tables.

I am looking for a way to grab the data from the finished form to a list or spreadsheet that reports can be run against.

I am new to Sharepoint and am not a developer so some sort of codeless solution would be ideal. We are on Sharepoint 2010 .

I found a post here that seems might lead me in the right direction.

How to Query a Form Library in SharePoint 2010

Specifically the second option of one of the answers:

"Sharepoint Form Library This is propably the option you are using at the moment because by default it saves the filled out form as a document within a form library. You can also use this option to save data to a list by adding another Export connection pointing to your sharepoint list."

I cant find any good information on how to export form data from an Infopath form in a form library to a list.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can also use a third-party SSRS connector like Enesys. It's pretty effective.

Answer 2

You can always surface the information by promoting the InfoPath data to SharePoint columns. For things like repeating tables, you'd need to have logic in the form that adds up all the fields in the repeating table, stores it in a field that in turn gets promoted to SharePoint.

This would then allow you to use totals in the SharePoint list or roll your own DVWPs or KPI against those numbers.

Answer 3

There are a lot of limitation around "reporting" over SharePoint list/libs.

In case InfoPath forms we will have issues with repeating data - tables/sections. They can't be promoted except as some aggregations/last/first values.

Another concerns are about performance degradation you will have in case you query sharepoint lists/libs or even try to make custom code, get xml document and make reporting over it.

I doubt there is a "no code" generic solution for that task. There might be, bit only with limitation (as data promoting) and huge performance limitation.

So, in that case I would recommend to move all the data (list/doc/InfoPath xml) to MSSQL database and make up a BI solution with SSRS (no code approach). Data could be moved with SSIS (no code approach). That's a better way and that's how the reporting solutions have to work.

Answer 4

We do this on InfoPath forms. Promote the InfoPath fields you want into the SharePoint List (form library). Next, use SSRS 2008 R2/2012 to generate SSRS reports using the SharePoint List data source. This can all be done via no-code.