As we all know, tabbed controls make it a lot easier to enter data on a form. Surprisingly, InfoPath does not provide a built-in tab control. This leads to form designs that are much less intuitive than they could be.

There is a nice article on the InfoPath Team Blog that shows how to create tabbed views using table cells and buttons. Unfortunately, this technique is limited to switching between form views. What if you want to have a set of tabs for the data within a view? Or what if you want to have more than one set of tabs on the same view?

In this Camtasia video, I demonstrate a variation of the technique that lets you display as many tabbed sections as you like on any view of a form.

The basic idea is the same. We'll use a table with shading to give the visual effect of tabs, and we'll use buttons for each tab. But instead of placing the content of each tab within a view, we'll place the content in a table cell. And instead of using a rule that switches the current view when the user clicks a button, we'll use javascript in a button click event to update the form so that the 'active' tab is made visible and the other tabs are hidden.

Enjoy

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