InfoPath Dev

This is my situation, I have a form that is currently live and being used daily, I am about to pass the form onto someone else to support and update, but it's not organized very well so I wanted to take some time to make sure all the fields are in folders that make sense and whatnot...  When I go to move a field I get this message: 'This change will rename, remove, or modify a field stored in this form.  Existing forms that have been filled out will lose the data stored in this field.  Do you want ot make the change?'

Will this actually cause lost data with existing forms if I'm simply moving the field?  Or is that supposed to be a generic warning message for deleting, renaming, and moving all alike?  I use some of the fields in code behind the form, so I know I'll have to change the any xpath references to match, that should be easy, but I want to make sure moving the fields will not cause other issues!  Does anyone know for sure?

Yes, in even the simplest of scenarios you will lose data. For example: you have a form with one text box. You create some XML based on that form template. Then you modify the schema and place the textbox field within a group. When you open the existing XML, the text box will be blank.

You perhaps could make use of an XSLT transform which would transform your current xml schema into the new form template schema and map the data appropriately. I haven't done this myself but perhaps Google shows some information on this. Good luck!

That's really unfortunate...  But thanks a lot for letting me know!  Glad I didn't go ahead and try to change that then.

Just so you know - it is possible to preview existing XML with your form. So if you have a form in production, and you are making changes to the template, if you preveiw with one or more of your existing XML, you can quickly ascertain the possible repercussions. Here's a little blog post on this.

Cool I'll try that out next time, thanks again for the info!