There is another way. Similar to Jasmin's suggestion, but instead of prepopulating the data into the form, get the form to invoke a web service. You can pass parameters to the web service to determine what search you want to do, and can parse the results, and populate a table (or whatever) in the form.
You can write the web service itself using whatever tools you like, including (my personal preference:-) a livecycle orchestration - so all the connection and query logic are in the backend, not the form - the form just does the user interface.
We do this all the time in many of our forms to retrieve "lookup" data to dynmamically populate dropdowns, etc. If you'd like some assistance getting this set up, email info-at-avoka.com.
Another option would be to build a flex application, and embed this into the Workspace as an initial form.
Howard
http://www.avoka.com