Accessing Forms Tool Data
Applies to: SharePoint Workspace 2010 | Visual Studio 2008
The GrooveForms2 Web Service provides access to the Groove Forms and the InfoPath Forms tools in Groove 2007 workspaces. These tools share the same data storage mechanism, but use different mechanisms for designing and displaying the forms. In many cases Web Services applications can treat the Groove Forms Tool and the InfoPath Forms Tool in the same way. In this section, the term Forms tool refers to either the Groove Forms or the InfoPath Forms tool and is used when describing features common to both tools.
You can code a Groove Web Service SOAP application to work with a Forms tool with any design or with a specific design. If you code it for a specific design, the application can have knowledge of the forms, record schemas, and semantics of the design. Typically, if your application is updating records in the Forms tool, it should be coded with this knowledge. If you code an application to update a Forms tool without knowledge of the tool semantics, the updates may violate constraints enforced by Groove Forms tool scripts and, consequently, make the tool unusable through the SharePoint Workspace user interface.
There are two Groove Forms tool design templates provided with Groove: the Discussion and Issue Tracker tools. Many of the sample code fragments in this section are coded to work with one of these two tools. These examples could be modified to run with another specific Forms tool design.
Overview of the GrooveForms2 Service
The GrooveForms2 service provides complete Create, Replace, Update, and Delete access to the Forms tool data records, but provides more limited access to the Forms tool design. You have read access to the Forms tool design and can replace the design of the Forms tool using another Forms tool as a template, but you cannot make any other modification to the Forms tool design.
The Forms tool designer can customize the Forms tool to contain any number and type of fields in a form. Consequently, the schema describing the SOAP representation of a Forms tool record is dependent on the Forms tool design and may be different for different instances of the Forms tool. The GrooveForms2 Web Service API handles this variation by using a self-describing record format, called the Forms2RecordDataSet.
In This Section
Groove Forms Tools Versions and Web Services
Accessing Forms Tool Design Information