My First Cute Little InfoPath Application
One way to find a Microsoft victim answering the question, “Where do you want to go today?” Is when you discover that they prefer to keep a table of favorite Web sites—say upwards of 600 favorite web sites—in separate files. I went there. Until just a few days ago, I would rather store over 600 Internet Explorer Favorites in a bunch of files and folders. Why can’t I use one XML file?
[ ](http://kintespace.com/bitmaps/blog_infopath_favorites_form.jpg) |
| Songhay System Favorites |
With InfoPath at my disposal, I am free to use some common, XML sense. I whipped up a form that edits a bunch of Web links. This file can then be processed by an XSL template on the client side (barring any InfoPath-related processing instructions) by most modern browsers. So now, I can move around one file of favorites from browser to browser and from machine to machine instead of 600!
I wonder why FireFox does not use XML for its bookmarks file…
By the way, I won’t be entering the Favorites data one file at a time—over 600 times. I will be using the system that produces the kinté links page here at kintespace.com. It’s an ancient VB6 control that crawls over my Favorites folders and refreshes a SQL Server table. I’ll be cutting and pasting from this table and using a few Find/Change operations with regular expressions.