InfoPath Dev

Here's the rundown...I've worn myself troubleshooting this thing...Infopath 2007 forms (one with multiple views and one with just an input/output switch) dropping text when exporting to PDF (whether using the add-in or a 3rd party tool).  I've ran down through the forms - data settings are good, view properties are good, repeating tables and attributes are good; and, when pressing the input out to the output view(s), all is good.  In fact, if I straight print from InfoPath, it prints out without any text dropping (just not in the same format).  Here's the big head scratcher, it's intermittent...file size isn't a clue and I looked at the XML files to see if I had extra EOFs or anything else that looked out of sorts and can't find anything.  Size of the file and/or media attachments make no difference...stripped out media, same results.  I was pulling hairs and took a shot at some of the other export options - out to web format and then opening in Word is a disaster, but I then went and printed the output to OneNote and then
published to PDF from there and it's almost perfect (the OneNote imprint expands the size of the file quite a bit 215K to 6MB which making email them a bit troublesome) and no dropped text. 

I've search everywhere...it's not the form, not the XML files, something is happening randomly during the Export.  I'm stumped.

Hi -- any kind of consistency in what is missed in the Export? I had a form once that did this -- it was specifically in a repeating section that had a lot of text.... What controls are losing text? When you say it is intermittent -- does that mean that the exact same XML sometimes loses text and sometime doesn't? Or that some XML from the template do and some don't? When this happened to me, it was based on how much text was entered....so for the form, some XML would have this happen, some would not.

Absolutely no pattern to the behavior...file size, media attachments, specific attributes...nothing specific/repeatedly is triggering the issue.  I have one section that is not a repeating section that kicks out to a separate view/report and it has had issues too; but, again, randomly...sometimes, it's fine, sometimes it drops text.  The best way to described way it is doing is that the text is "chopping" off at a certain point and leaving blank pages in it's wake.  Sometimes is a clean break and sometimes you see have of the line of text that is at the chopping point.  Granted, the larger outputs do tend to have more issues than the others, but I've consistently had smaller outputs that are bombing too.  Originally though it was media attachments, but after stripping them all out and re-running everything from scratch, same results. 

The text being truncated was definitely what I saw as well in my form. I take it from what you say above that the control that has an issue is also random? Could be a text box, a rich text box, an expression box?

My issue was one that was consistently reproducible -- if I had more than a certain amount of text in a field, it would be truncated.

Can you give me some directions on where I might start digging to into opening up the fields....BTW:  Got the export to work perfect via PDFCreator, but it's not really a good solution for me since the other groups I'm dealing with on this project don't have great bandwidth to download a 17MB file, we're kindof limited here thus the reason for a forms solution versus a web solution.

Well, since you seem to have infinite variation as to where the problem occurs, and yours doesn't seem to relate to length of content in any given control, it is kind of hard to provide any direction. Are you using a print view? Or is this a standard view that you export to PDF?

With my form that gave me an issue, I found that removing the labels before my text boxes ended up solving it. Initially in each repeating section I'd had sections with some text for a label, then an expression box bound to the field I wanted to display. I recall that I finally got my text to stop truncating when I switched to text boxes and took out my labels.... but it was an odd situation that seemed to only occur with that particular form. I tried to reproduce the issue in another form (I was going to blog it) and was unable to.

I'll give it a shot and let you know.

The textboxes are ascii, not richtext.  Is it possible that there is a character limit there...the one thing that is consistent with the geeked up PDF files is that regardless of the length of the total report (long or short) at least one section is large in content...there are 13 repeating sections, so the damage could be from entries in any one of them, but if it's a flat limit issue, that would make sense.  Thoughts, ideas, suggestions???