Providing Intelligent Forms

The portal requires forms for many reasons, from registration and profiles to creating business transactions. Data should ideally be entered only once. You can choose among several tools to create web forms. This section discusses the pros and cons of these approaches, and the trade-offs in development, functionality, and deployment.

All of these approaches store data as XML. InfoPath was designed from the start as a tool for creating XML documents, Office has been migrating more and more to XML with each new version, and naturally data behind custom .NET forms is stored as XML. The trade-offs center around application functionality, development costs, and ease of maintenance.

Web Forms

As discussed in Chapters 4

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