Additional category: InfoPath

Summary: An InfoPath 2007 form deployed to a MOSS server provides a drop-down list of vendors tied to a custom MOSS list. Upon selecting a vendor, rules assign field values to a handful of text fields such as sales rep name, address, city, state, zip and phone. Performance is horrible. We notice that performance gets worse (in a non-linear fashion) for each additional field we update this way. I.e., if we just update the sales rep name, it takes [x] amount of time. If we update sales rep, address1, address2, city, state, zip, it takes 10 times longer.

Solution: Write a web service (sample code can be found here) that is passed in the name of a vendor and it returns back the vendor details. Then, assign the fields this way. Although this too seems slow, there was no discernable difference in performance when we assigned 1 field versus 8 fields. As an added bonus, users get a cool "contacting the server" Cylon effect while they wait for the form to invoke and consume the service results.