Welcome to our free SharePoint End User Training tutorial. This tutorial is based on Webucator's SharePoint 2016 End User Training course.
A SharePoint Forms library is a special library designed to store Microsoft InfoPath form documents. Microsoft InfoPath comes with a designer tool for graphically creating forms with a wide assortment of fields and controls. The InfoPath Designer can then be used to publish the forms you design to SharePoint rendering them as web page templates for Forms libraries.
At the time of this writing Microsoft had stated that InfoPath would be retired. For SharePoint 2016 they left support for the tool in but there is not a 2016 version of the client tools. This means you can still use it in SharePoint 2016 but to create custom forms you use the InfoPath 2013 Designer tool. It is possible that future version of SharePoint will not support InfoPath forms at all. For this reason coverage of this chapter is optional for this course.
Lesson Goals
You can create a Forms Library just as easy as creating any other library in SharePoint. The following screen capture shows the Forms Library template:
Although it is easy to create a Forms Library using the App template, if you are planning on designing forms with InfoPath Designer, it is usually simpler to create a library as part of the publishing process. One advantage of using the publishing process to create the library is you can choose which fields you want to create library columns for and which fields you only want stored in the XML body of the document item. In a later walk-through and in the lab exercises, you will see how to publish a form template and create a library at the same time.
In this walk-through, you will learn how to create a simple form using Microsoft InfoPath Designer.
Leave InfoPath open for the next walk-through that will show you how to publish the form to SharePoint.
This walk-through will show you how to publish the InfoPath form created in the previous walk-through. As part of the publishing process, the walk-through will create a new Forms library with custom library columns. The walk-through will then test the new form by creating a new item in the library.
InfoPath requires that you save the form before you can publish it.
In this exercise, you will how to create a basic InfoPath form and publish it to a SharePoint site.
Note that there are several controls to choose from in the Controls list box. This example is intended to be a simple example so you are only using the Text Box control, but feel free to experiment on your own with other types of controls.