InfoPath Dev

I created a form in infopath to emulate a client intake form for my company. One of the aspects of this form is it unfortunately needs to be signed off by 26 (twenty six!) different individuals. As you can imagine, this creates some complication. After trial/experimenting, I stumbled upon this behavior -

• Person A opens the form, reviewing info
• Meanwhile Person B opens the form, Submit's the form
• Person A finally finishes their review, Submits the form

Net Result: Person B's work is lost.

After doing some searching around, I came upon this post by Hilary detailing a way to auto check in/check out files and I thought my troubles were over. Unfortunately, they weren't. People would open the form, get distracted and close their browser window/tab, or decide they would rather tackle it later and close their browser window, and the form never gets checked back in, leaving it in limbo and other users frustrated because they are locked out of it. I've gone through and made a powershell script that will loop through all items on that library and if their check out time is greater than 5 minutes ago, discard the check out as a work around for this issue, but in thinking about it, then the issue becomes what happens with corner cases where they were distracted, but didn't close their browser window, check their browser at a later time, think "Oh yeah", and go to click off. At this point, they would have potentially old information cached and anyone who opened/did work on the form between from when their check out was discarded and now would be lost.

I guess my questions are thusly:

• Does anyone know of a way to implement an automatic closeout on the form? I'm thinking like the behavior you see on your bank's website or something
• Is there a way to catch/handle someone closing the browser while in an infopath form?
• Am I being totally dense in what I feel is the underlying main problem - i.e. is there some better way to handle two (or more) people being in a form at the same time, without losing all of their work?

Any help here, tips, insight, really - anything, would be greatly appreciated, as I am at a loss at what to do to try and further bulletproof issues. Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to provide. Sleepless in San Diego

Oh yuck. The best laid plans annihilated by users, right? :)

I can't think of a thing that will get you around this kind of user behavior.... if approvals are in the form. Have you thought about using an approval workflow instead? Something outside of the form? Or do they have to be able to make changes to the form data as part of the approval process?

So, here's what I ended up doing: I'm keeping the check out, but in the query to see if the form is checked out, I also go ahead and grab the modified date on the form, store that into a value. In my custom save buttons, I then requery for the modified datetime and compare the stored value versus what is currently being returned in the query. If the time is the same, submit(), if the queried time is later than the stored time, failover into a view explaining how their session expired and someone else has modified the form since, if the queried time is somehow earlier than the stored time, check my flux capacitor. It's not a perfect solution, but I think that should get us performing close where we need to be. I'd prefer an explicit form close just so there's no ambiguity, but hopefully this works as a nice compromise since we don't have a way to force the close.