InfoPath Dev

Hey everyone,

 I am a relative newbie (I know VB and VBA but have never coded it in Sharepoint.)

The issue I'm having is a non-coded one, though.

We've created a form that requires multiple approvals, in order, based on field responses in the form. To handle routing through the multiple signatures, I promoted several fields to view in the column and needed for Workflows. 'Status, Description, DocumentID, Year'

We published it to our Production Sharepoint server and all was good until they requested changes to the form.

When I moved up the changes by publishing, it overwrote the Template.xsn and ALL previous form signatures became invalid.

PROBLEM ONE - Is there any way to revalidate these signatures?

Lesson learned - I discovered after research that to prevent that pain, I have to publish as a Content Type.

Unfortunately, when I do, although the previous forms stay linked to their previous forms wonderfully, and the Invalid Signatures problem went away,

Infopath seems to have created duplicate columns for the promoted fields - this appears to happen randomly. I see no way to keep Infopath from doing this.

I found a separate thread here on this issue with a 'workaround' which involves matching the GUID of the promoted fields to the GUID of the fields promoted on the server. I can get to the GUIDs on the server using SPM, but I have NO WAY of seeing the XML of the xsn document I'm about to publish.

PROBLEM TWO: HELP! How do I view/change the XML of the Infopath document to publish? Is there a patch for Infopath now that fixes this issue/provides an additional checkbox to prevent it?

PROBLEM THREE: HOW do I get rid of the fields on the server? Using SPM? what is the impact of doing that? Currently, one of the promoted fields is Read-Only. (The description). I noticed that the 'Allow users to update this field in Datasheet Mode' was unchecked. I changed this for future publications/documents, but how do I modify the previous fields so that I can get rid of them?

PROBLEM FOUR: For the several versions now published, HOW do I remap their promoted fields to the correct GUID now that they are published to the server? Using SPM again? I noticed in Site Settings I should be able to disassociate and delete these promoted fields, but the 'read only' one isn't modifiable.

 

Hi Misterchris,

I already had this problem, it's really annoying

MisterChris:

 Infopath seems to have created duplicate columns for the promoted fields - this appears to happen randomly. I see no way to keep Infopath from doing this.

The best way to prevent it, is to check on each field that "Create a new column", is not selected.

Thanks, Potemkine.

 Ok, I got through this ugly nightmare, at least mostway.  (On our dev server).

I used SPM to change the read-only field (and all its duplicates) to False (not read-only) - took some looking to figure out where to change it - on the FIELD, not on the field on form or in the columns. They seem to have picked up the inheritance, once I clicked 'save'.

Then I used Sharepoint Site Settings to remove ALL form references to all the columns and deleted the columns.

Then published one more form, making sure to create new columns, this created ONE new copy of selected columns.

Then went in via site settings/content types and added these Infopath columns to every form version there.

The promoted fields were all still blank, but I was able to go into every previous document and save them, and it promoted the data for all of them just fine.

Finally, I published a new content type as another test for future modifications - and as I did so, I did as you suggest here and checked EVERYcolumn on the 'promoted fields' screen.

ALL of them had 'Create a new column' checked. I changed it to (this content) and selected the fields from there. No DUPS. huzzah.

SO... in all future versions and moveups, I will need to check every field every time to ensure they are not creating a new column. I can live with that.

NOW, I just need to make these changes to production.

Still don't know how or IF I can fix the 'invalid signature' problem. I'm guessing not.

Hi Misterchris, I did the same thing remove all columns, and recreate them.I don't know exactly, how it happens, but I use a dev environment too, If I publish the same form to prod/dev the column ID is not the same and Infopath loose is binding.

For your Signature, if you have add some new field on your form template by default your xml is updated and your new field is added ... and your signature become invalid. You can configure your form to not update the existing form, on form option go to versionning and set "on version update" to "do nothing", the old xml signature still be valid if you doesn't save them with your new template.