InfoPath provides several additional ways for you to control various aspects of form security, by controlling the options available to users.
You can protect the design of a form by enabling form protection. When protection is enabled, users will be unable to modify the form template when filling out a form.
Using this setting does not lock the form completely; rather, it disables the customization commands on the Tools menu, and the toolbar icon. Users can still open the form in design mode, but they will receive a warning that it is protected.
To enable form protection, choose the Enable protection check box on the General tab of the Form Options dialog box.
You can configure a form template so that users can merge the data from multiple forms into one form. Usually, the data that is merged must be saved in a repeating field or in a field that is part of a repeating group, and the standard way of merging works reliably with forms that have identical schemas.
You’ll learn more about merging forms in Chapter 14. At this time you’ll just deal with enabling merging. To enable merging choose Tools→Form Options, and check Enable form merging. Figure 10-2 shows both protection and merging enabled.
Figure 10-2: Enabling protection and merging.
When you set view properties, you can decide whether users should be able to choose the view from the View menu and therefore edit the visible data. This option is only available if the current form has two or more views. If the default view is the only available view, no choices will appear.
To enable a view, first select it. Then choose View→Manage Views. Now check the Show on the View menu . . . check box in the View settings section of the General tab. See Figure 10-3.
Figure 10-3: Enabling a view.
You can design a form so that users can submit to a Web service, through HTTP, or by launching a script. Submitting forms is covered in more detail in Chapter 7.
To enable form submission, choose Tools→Submitting Forms and choose Enable submit. This enables other controls in the dialog box and lets you set other options
When you have enabled submission, you can customize the Submit command and the behavior of the form after submission. You can choose to enable a submit command on the file menu, modify the default command text Su&bmit, and include an access key.
You may also specify the form behavior after the user has submitted the form. There are options to close the form, create a new form, or leave the submitted form open. You can also customize the success and failure messages that you want to appear. Figure 10-4 shows the dialog box.
Figure 10-4: The Submit Options dialog box.