Is there a way to submit an InfoPath form to an Access database if the form was designed first?

Question

I've created an InfoPath form and added fields, controls, data validation and more, but now wish for the form data to be submitted to an access database. Looking through help guides, however, it seems that the way to do this is to design the database first and then design a new form based on the database.

Is there a way to design a database now, match its fields with those in my form template, and designate it as the primary data source for the template so that it exports data to there upon submit?

Answer 1

I know nothing about Infopath. Do the following links help?

Submit form data to a Microsoft Access database

Infopath Team Blog: Do You Love Access? We do too!

Answer 2

Unfortunatly InfoPath does not have the functionality to convert the main datasource from XML to a database.

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250994.aspx

(Look for the note in the middle of the page)

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In my opinion InfoPath support for databases is not very robust anyway. I don't use databases as a main datasource very often anymore. I usually handle database interactions in secondary datasources and use C# managed code for any insert/update actions I need.

If I really needed to do this conversion here is how I would do it: At the end of the day you template is simply a collection of XML documents. Create two new templates. In one, create an identical main datasource as you already have. In the other, create the datasource you want attached to your database. Do a Save As Source Files... and use Beyond Compare or such to compare the two templates. Learn what is different between a database connection and a XML connection and make those changes by hand in your target template (make a backup first).