Hide That InfoPath Button

In my last post I showed how you can make a form look a bit more professional by using views and picture buttons to navigate around the views

This works great but one thing I did think about was what would happen if a user just clicked the Next button without filling in some of the fields, well unfortunately the answer is nothing

Even if you make the fields mandatory it won’t flag up any error until the end of the process and the Submit button is clicked; not ideal

So I started to think about how I could overcome this and decided on ‘hiding’ the button until a field was completed

Add A Rule

The way to hide the button is to add a formatting rule

Click on the picture button you want to hide and from the Home tab on the ribbon click on Manage Rules

A new action pane should appear to the right of the screen

Click on New and select Formatting

Tick the box next to Hide This Control and then click on the word None under Condition

You now need to create a condition that will tell InfoPath to hide the button if this condition is met, as an example I am going to set it so that the button is hidden if the PastTarget1 field is blank

To do this click on the down arrow in the first field of the condition builder and click on Select a field or group..

From this pop up window select the field you want to use and click OK

Now change the 2nd option to is blank like below

Your rule should now look like this

Now when the form loads the button should be hidden until the filed is completed

And Finally

You could of course make it even more complex by adding in And / Or operators that would make it so that every field in the view had to be completed before the button showed up

Next post will show how to create a simple ribbon for your views that is consistent across all of them