I am in the process of building an infopath form for researchers to
collect data on an expedition and bring back to the office when when
they get back to populate a centralized collection database. The form
is built on an MS SQL data source, but should be usable offline when
they go out into the field (there is no online access where they are
collecting data from).

So the questions:

I am trying to create a unique field from 3 collected fields, animal,
date ,and transmitter. The three fields are integers that look
something like this:

animal: 2221
transmitter: 423
date: 05/25/2006

The unique number looks like this when its concatenated:
222105252006423

I can do this function in pretty much any other programming language,
but have a couple of issuses when dealing with Infopath. The cunudrum:

An expression box pointed to the data source record with the following
expression would work:

[code]     concat(@trans, @animal)    [/code]

This concats the transmitter and animal perfectly. But... It isn't an
integer which is what I need for the database. And.. I loose the date
field. What I really want is:

[code]     concat(@trans, @date, @animal)    [/code]

But that lookse like this when it outputs, and isn't an integer:

222105/25/2006423

So I need a way to strip the slashes out of the date return in the
concat function as well as returning the function as an integer.

Second question, is...

Is is possible to save an offline form as an executable, without
Infopath and still save the data to connect to the database when they
get back into the field? Or.... is there an infopath viewer that
someone can use to fill out the form? A lot of our researchers are
still using older versions of Office without infopath as an installed
package.

Thanks in advance.