InfoPath Dev

 Hello

I have a relatively large form with 2 main views. One view is the one the user fills in, then the other is the one they are presented with when the form has been submitted (i.e. a read only view). The views are largely identical with the main difference being the read only status and cosmetic changes.

Anyway, over the last week or so I have been having intermittent problems while publishing the form. It will take ages and throw the "...can only be opened using InfoPath Filler..." message yet clicking to publish immediately after and it will go through fine "the form has been published successfully".

 To me this suggests the form itself is valid, but there is a timeout issue somewhere?

I have used Fiddler and indeed I can see that the call to the formsServices.asmx web service, and specifically the  DesignCheckFormTemplate, will sometimes return a successful status of 200 (and the form has published) but then other times it will return status 500 - failed.

The 500 response XML does include an error message:

• The server was unable to process request. Unsupported expression. 

This perhaps suggests there is a problem in the form somewhere but I think that may be a red herring, and in fact the whole call to DesignCheckFormTemplate is timing out? (if it were a true badly formatted form the XML response from the server would give me a proper break down?).  Indeed, checking the value of SPRequestDuration of the request response and it looks like any time it fails, the duration is over 300000 milliseconds, yet any time it is successful it is under this value. 

 So, my question is, can anyone confirm that this is indeed a time out issue when publishing the form?

And if so, what options do I have to resolve this problem? I am using SharePoint Online, so I do not believe changing a timeout threshold is an option...but would welcome confirmation of that.

Is my ONLY option to reduce the complexity of my form in some way (e.g. deleting one of my views immediately halves the SPRequestDuration and leads to a successful publish). This would be a hard task to do as of course, everything in my form is required!

 Any help or advice appreciated,

Thanks

Andrew 

If you remove a view the form will publish? Does it matter which view? Does your form have code in it?

 Hi Hilary,

Thanks for your reply (and all your other replies on other threads that have been very handy over the last few months :) ). There is no code in my form, although there are fields which fire off a lot of "set a fields value" actions and perhaps chained rules. 

Also, I just spent an hour with Microsoft support and we tried:

• Deleting the first view, leave the second one there - this publishes with a ~200 second response
• Deleting the second view, leave the first one there - this publishes with a ~200 second response 

I think they are of the opinion that it is also a timeout issue on the server. They did point out that there is a  SharePoint "Solution Cache Size" of 300MB that may also be linked to this:

The solution cache allows the InfoPath Forms service to hold solutions in cache in order to speed up retrieval of the solutions. If the cache size is exceeded, solutions are retrieved from disk, which may slow down response times. You can configure the size of the solution cache by using the Windows PowerShell cmdlet Set-SPInfoPathFormsService. For more information, see Set-SPInfoPathFormsService. 

Perhaps this is why my form publishes sometimes (late at night or early morning) if my users haven't had a chance to fill up this cache! Of course, without SharePoint On Premise, I cant adjust this value.

It seems my only option is to start taking elements away from my form in an effort to get it under the 300 second limit. It looks like I only need another 3 or 4 seconds..... 

Thanks
Andrew 

Do you have any pictures or logos in your form? InfoPath may be storing duplicates of images, we could manually modify the view so both views use the same image, for example. That may get the size down.... so you don't have to get up at 3am to publish your form. ;)

I hope not :)

I do have quite a lot of images in my form but they are all bound to the same control (think this is what you mean?). 

I have also already optimised other images in my form, for example, my form logo was actually massive but then shrunk down with width and height parameters,...which meant my file was 1.5MB in size. By shrinking the image outside of the form first, its halfed the file size..