InfoPath Dev

Hi All

We use sharepoint to host huge infopath documents and it all was good until we move the client to infopath 2007. The infopath xml opens good with infopath 2003 and when we use infopath 2007 to open the xml, it says "Connecting to Server for information" and freezes and never opens infopath or let the user to close the infopath. The does not happen always. We have data connections,rules and .Net code in the form.

It will be great help if anyone has encountered such issue or know how to fix the issue.

 thanks

Rathna Subbu

Hi Rathna,

Are you using Forms Services to render the forms in the browser? The browser has performance limitations around displaying lots of data and that could explain the freeze. Another issue is if you are calling Web Services on another machine (double hop scenario) and you aren't authenticating correctly between the SharePoint server and the Web service server.

Hi Patrick

 Thanks for your response. We do not use form services and no web service call is made during freezing. It still works good with Infopath 2003 and the issue happens only with Infopath 2007.

Today MS came up saying it tries to pull all the xml tied to the template which might cause it to freeze which sounds like there is a major shift in Infopath 2007 logic how it refresh the template if the xml points to a different one.

 thanks

Rathna Subbu

No, there is no major shift between InfoPath 2003 and InfoPath 2007. You are experiencing a very rare issue.

Questions:

• How big is your XSN file (the InfoPath template)
• How big is the XML file you are trying to open?
• Do you have any data connections in the XSN? For example, to pull from SharePoint List? 

My guess is that you have a lot of data in your XSN and it is taking time to download the first time. The other possibility is that your XML is really big. Lastly, it's also possible you are trying to pull all elements from a large SharePoint list.

Patrick

1. The XSN is developed using VSTO managed code  and it is about 400kb

2. The xml's are around 20kb

3. We have couple of data connections and we control them based on the data.

The weired behaviour is that the same XML with the saml XSN opens without issues most of the time. When we open a xml which points to another similar template it just freezes in "Connecting the server for information" dialog.

thanks

Rathna Subbu

rathna,

 Have you cracked this problem?  We are having a similar issue--certain users just completely hose infopath upon opening the form.  Unpredictable and aggravating.

Hi all

 anyone found a solution for this problem. I have exactly the same issue. Infopath randomly never opens (freezes) trying to open an infopath document from sharepoint. "Contacting server for information", then session is frozen. Killing the process and trying again worked for the moment, happens only randomly.

 How did you resolve that error?

 thanks

Thomas

 I'll be curious about any known fix for this as well.  The lock-up happens before the status bar appears (which, of course, indicates that the data is downloading from SP).  If I hard-stop InfoPath though (force quit), and click the same link again, the data and form open normally.

 Really annoying and puzzling.

This issue disappeared for a couple weeks but we had three occurences today.  During the last one we were able to get on the machine and see it.  I verified connectivity to the SharePoint server and was able to download Word docs from other SP libraries while this was happening.  Most of the time when Infopath hangs like this, SharePoint registers that the user has checked out the document even though they never succeeded in opening it.  So after ending task on Infopath, the next launch doesn't usually hang, but Sharepoint will only let them have read-only access because of the previous checkout.  We have to wait for the checkout to expire before the user can actually edit the form.

That does get to be one of the most annoying aspects of the crash. The unlock takes maybe 15 minutes to happen........a definite hit to productivity. I hope that someone can come up with an answer.  I'll keep trying.

FYI, all.  On a hunch, I changed my JVM in my IE browser, to see what effect it might have on the InfoPath crash.  When I run the Microsoft VM/console, the problem is solved.  When I use the Sun JRE as my VM, I continue to have the problem.  I tried that change because it has played a role in past LMS communications and our ability/inability to launch courseware.  IE sometimes just upchucks when certain code hits the Sun JRE (though I prefer Sun's).

Message me or post back here if you'd like a screenshot of my current settings.

Cheers!

I like the hunch, and I want to try it, but I have a couple problems.  First, I've never been lucky enough to witness this problem on my own machine, so I won't know if I fixed it unless I get a lot of test subjects, and then they'll all have to go a month without a lockup to convince me.  Second, we have 550 users and maybe a hundred installed apps, so there would have to be a very lengthy and comprehensive testing cycle before I could even think about  taking down JVM as I don't quite understand how the JVM is interacting with Infopath.  We are having trouble launching forms in the Infopath client.  Are you launching in Infopath or in the browser (web-enabled Infopath forms)?   

Thanks for the inspiration, you've given me something to work on, anyway...

I understand the need for UAT/QA....I would do it as well.  I haven't heard that the crash is widespread among my users yet, but we shall see.  I am launching the forms in InfoPath.

Today I witnessed the freezeup for the first time with my own eyes.  After getting a user report, I remoted to the user's machine, reviewed the task lisk, verified that Infopath was not running, and pinged a few servers to verify connectivity.   Then I launched the link and watched as Infopath locked.  When I checked the task list I found TWO copies of infopath.exe running.  I killed both and after that the document launched perfectly.  I have not been able to replicate this, but it would appear that in this case, at least, somehow Infopath got launched twice, and the two instances were contending with each other. 

Has anybody else seen this?  Theories about how it happens?   

 Interesting.  I'll look for that on my own machine as well.  I'll also check MSDN, etc.  I'll pass on anything that I find.