Hi, I'm new to
InfoPath and development in general and there is a lot of behind-the-scenes
stuff I don’t understand (my experience has always been as an end user, never
development). I built a form, then went out on leave, and we hired a consultant
to finish it. When I got back, we established a data connection to an external
data source (3rd party provider of health care records and we want to pull up
their list of program names for our organization). The data connection works
perfectly when I preview the form in InfoPath, but the connection is broken
when I publish it to SharePoint. Here is what our consultant said:
“To solve the
problem, you’ll need to understand where the data “lives”. Your
SharePoint environment isn’t seeing this information because the two locations
aren’t talking or the SQL environment isn’t set up to receive the credentials
remotely. The best thing to do is talk to the SQL database administrator
and explain that you want to access the data from a hosted SharePoint 2013
environment.”
I met with our
SQL guys and they don’t understand why it doesn’t work, either. We checked the
data connection at the server level and the 3rd party provider is not blocking us
and the credentials work, but it doesn’t work in the form. We then created a
data connection in SharePoint Designer at the site level, but it’s still not
working.
So the
connection works in the InfoPath form only, it does not work when it gets
published to SharePoint, even though the credentials work and we can connect to
the 3rd party provider from the server.
One thing I
noticed is when I create the data connection in InfoPath, it stores the data
connection on my local drive in My Documents. Is that supposed to happen?
Thoughts?