Microsoft Office Groove 2007 Forms Release Notes

  • Article

This document provides last minute developer documentation and information on what is new in the Groove Forms Tool APIs in Microsoft Office Groove 2007.

What's New in Groove 2007

In Groove 2007, there are two new Forms tools available: the Groove Forms Tool V5.0 and the InfoPath Forms Tool V1.0. These two tools share the same API, multi-record view mechanism, and data storage but use a different mechanism for designing the form and displaying it to the user. When you add new Forms tools to a Groove 2007 workspace, you can add the Groove Forms Tool V5.0 and the InfoPath Forms Tool V1.0, but you cannot add older versions of the Groove Forms Tool to a workspace. You can continue to use older versions of the Forms Tool in your existing Groove 3.1 workspaces.

The Groove Forms Tool V5.0 has the following new features:

  • Improved data storage efficiency: A separate schema is defined for each form in the Forms tool. These schemas include only the fields that are used in the form. In previous versions of the Groove Forms tool, a single schema was used to store records for all forms in a Forms tool. This single schema included all fields defined in any form in the Forms tool. Consequently, in previous versions, every record contained all fields defined in the tool but in Version 5 each record contains only the fields defined in its form.

  • Improved efficiency and consistency of field validation: In this release, field validation is performed by compiled code and the value is validated both when the user enters the data in the form field and when the record is updated. In previous releases, validation was performed by script code and the value was validated only when the user entered it in the form field. Consequently, it was possible to set a record field to an invalid value using script code. In this release, if script code attempts to set a field record to an invalid value, the attempt fails and returns an exception.

  • New public functions for accessing attachment fields on the current form. These functions allow you to get the number of attachments, get the name and size of each attachment, and to display the add attachment dialog. The new functions are CreateAttachmentsNameSizeEnum(), GetAttachmentCount(), and LoadAddAttachmentDialog().

  • New public functions for accessing Date and DateTime HTML fields. The new functions are SetHTMLFieldValueAsDate and GetHTMLFieldValueAsDate.

  • IGrooveFormsToolUIDelegate SendInstantMessage and SendInstantMessageWithLinks method returns a Boolean that indicates whether the user has approved sending the message. In previous versions, these functions did not return a value.

  • IGrooveFormsToolRecord interface implements the ID read-only property. This property was not available in previous versions of Groove.

The InfoPath Forms Tool V1.0 is a new tool in Groove 2007 and has the same data storage as the Groove Forms Tool V5.0. If you are developing an InfoPath Forms tool, you use the InfoPath environment to create your form in an InfoPath template. Note that your InfoPath template must use the InfoPath restricted security setting and must implement “Submit to host environment”. You can develop macros using the same HTML script environment and APIs as used for a Groove Forms Tool.

Note that if a macro updates a field in an InfoPath Forms tool record, the tool automatically updates the corresponding field in the InfoPath Xdocument.

SendEmail Functionality Removed from Groove Forms Tool

To improve security, the ability to send Email using the GrooveFormsToolMessagingServices interface has been removed from this release. The underlying functionality was removed from Groove 2007 so that you cannot use this feature in any version of the Groove Forms Tool. If you have an existing script that calls the SendEmail method, an informational message will be displayed to the user when the script attempts to send Email but the script will continue to execute without encountering an exception.

InviteToChat Functionality Removed from Groove Forms Tool

The instant chat feature is no longer available in Groove. The GrooveFormsToolMessagingServices InviteToChat method has been deprecated. If you call this method, it has no effect.

IGrooveBSTREnum Methods Deprecated

In Groove 2007, the following IGrooveBSTREnum methods have been deprecated:

  • GetCount

  • HasPrevious

  • OpenPrevious

  • SetDifference

In the previous version of Groove, some methods were listed in the interface reference page with the notation "not used in form scripts or macros". In Groove 2007, these methods are not listed on the reference pages.

New Access Denied Exception

In Groove 2007, if a script or macro attempts to call any method other than the methods documented in the Groove 2007 Forms Reference, it will generate an access denied exception.

GetHTMLFieldValue and SetHTMLFieldValue Behavior Changed on Date Time Fields

In the Groove Forms Tool, a single Date Time value is now stored in two HTML text boxes, one for the date part and one for the time part. You can access the Date Time value with the new GetHTMLFieldValueAsDate and SetHTMLFieldValueAsDate public functions. You should not use the GetHTMLFieldValue and SetHTMLFieldValue functions with Date Time fields.

If a Groove Forms Tool script calls GetHTMLFieldValue or SetHTMLFieldValue on a Date Time field, the function will access only the date part of the value. GetHTMLFieldValue returns the string representation of the date with no time value, and SetHTMLFieldValue sets the string representation of the date but leaves the time value unchanged.

GrooveMessageBoxIcon_Question Icon is Deprecated

The IGrooveFormsToolUIDelegate DisplayStatusBarMessage method no longer displays the question mark icon. If you specify the deprecated GrooveMessageBoxIcon_Question Public Script variable in the DisplayStatusBarMessage i_Icon parameter, the Forms tool displays the exclamation icon.