Best way to deal with a large form to list submission

Question

I'm currently working on an InfoPath 2007 form, that as part of its work will need to submit 180 fields to a seperate SharePoint 2007 List. I'm curious if anyone has an easy way to handle this, the best I can think of is maybe one of the 2:

A) Script the whole submit mechanism out in .NET from the InfoPath form
B) Build the mother of all SharePoint Designer workflows

Has anyone out there had a similar experience? What did you do to tackle a form so big?

Answer 1

Do all the fields also need to be validated before they are updated, or are they validated using rules in the form? If they still need to be validated, then you may want to go with your option A. If not, there are other possibilities.

One of the benefits of InfoPath is that the data is saved in XML format. So what you can do, rather than promoting 180 fields to a SharePoint list so you can write a SPD workflow, is write a Visual Studio workflow that parses the XML document and uses case or if statements to insert to the appropriate lists.

Keep in mind that you will also need to handle update situations or disallow the forms from being edited.

Note: In case you haven't used code-behind in a IP form before, there are trust implications that you may not want to deal with: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa946782.aspx