Leveraging Visual Studio 2010 with InfoPath : Access Your Form Within a Visual Studio Workflow

You may access the form contents within a workflow by creating an object of the form. To create an object, you need to define a class that defines the structure of your form. Luckily, utilities are available to automatically generate this class for you.

First you need the source files of your InfoPath form. There are two ways to accomplish this. One way is to export the source files from InfoPath, and the other is to just extract them from your form template file.

To export the source files of your form, follow these steps:

1.	Open your form in design mode using InfoPath Designer 2010.
2.	Click File, Publish.
3.	Click the Export Source Files button, as shown in Figure 1. The Browse for Folder dialog appears. Figure 1. Clicking Export Source Files exports your form’s source files to a folder.
4.	Select a folder location and click OK. The source files are saved to the folder selected.
5.	Close InfoPath Designer.

To extract the source files right from the form template, follow these steps:

The file that you are most interested in is the myschema.xsd file. This contains the XML definition of your form. Using the Visual Studio xsd.exe utility, you can easily generate a class file using myschema.xsd. To do this, follow these steps:

1.	Open a Visual Studio command prompt. (This can be found under Start, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Tools.)
2.	Navigate to the location of your form source files.
3.	Type xsd /c myschema.xsd and press Enter, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. Using the xsd utility generates the class file. Note At the time of this writing, the xsd utility could not generate code for all InfoPath controls. If you run into any problems, search for any patches or updates.
4.	Back in Windows Explorer, rename the .cs file that was generated to your form name (for example, RegistrationForm.cs).
5.	Optionally, copy the .cs file into your workflow project folder.
6.	Add the .cs file to your workflow project, as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. Adding the form .cs file to your project allows you to leverage the form class.
7.	Copy the namespace from your workflow class file and paste it into your form class file, as shown in Figure 4. Your form classes must be in the same namespace to be accessed within the workflow code. Figure 4. Placing the form classes into the workflow namespace allows you to access the objects within the workflow code.

Now the class is part of the workflow project. The next steps and code pertain to the workflow class:

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

private void GetFormValues()
{
    XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(myFields));
    XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader
(workflowProperties.InitiationData));
    myFields registrationForm = (myFields)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
}

You may now access the form as an object and set class variables to the values the user entered, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Serializing the object allows you to access the entered values.