InfoPath Dev

Hi Guys,

First of all, I wanted to thank all of InfopathDev.com team for providing such a excellent job in helping people like me.

We are planning to deploy Infopath 2007 broswe based forms to Sharepoint 2007 and as per few blogs, I have to convert my web services which are consumed by my infopath form to UserConnectionData files(.udcx). What is the best way to deploy web services on Sharepoint 2007 which has Infopath 2007 browser enabled forms, as I am really confused of why we need to convert WebServices to UserConnectionDatafiles(.udcx) in Infopath form.

We are planning to migrate site collection which has form templates and .udcx files from test server to production server. What is the best way to do this as  Do I manually need to change the URL of the web services in the .udcx files to point to a new URL on the production server.

please let me know, what to do? 

Thanks very much

Chandra 

Since you have probably read all the UDC-related blogs on the InfoPath Team Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/search.aspx?q=udc&p=1) I will not go into much detail other than mentioning that the biggest reason why you need to convert to UDC is because otherwise you will not get a chance of properly authenticating (maybe things will still work if your webservices are hosted on a website that allow anonymous access but usually you don't want to do this and it might not even work). Even once you convert to UDC getting webservices to work is a bit tricky but I am assuming you've got past that issue.

I think another critical thing is that it is easiest to have your web services to run on the same machine as InfoPath Forms Server (you're supposed to be able to make things work even if they don't but I was having trouble last time I tried).

As far as for converting the data connections, you will have to do it through the Designer for the first time but it might be enough to simply extract the files and edit manifest.xsf as you move the solution/connections from the test server to the production server.

We had to do this as well. As I recall, we just opened the udcx files in visual studio and did it manually. It's a pain making the transfer, but once we got the hang of it, it went quick. We actually ended up just storing all of our connection files online from there after because it was so much easier. I'll do a bit of digging and see if I can't find some of my old work and post a psuedo-tutorial here