InfoPath Dev

Hi Folks,... It happen second time, so i thought to post this issue. Please advice....I am working in Infopath 2003 (Client) form with MOSS.... I had 100+ forms in my Form library with all fields mapped to columns in List. However, I made a minor change in my infopath form and published the form, suddenly all of my data got vanish. Yes yes, whole Form library list got empty with no data. So i opened each form and resave the data. This way i did for 100+ form. :( and i got my data back. I know that this is not better solution, but to display data was very cruicial, so i had to do this.... Again, today i had deployed the form in Development box and same issue happened. Thank GOD its Development box and not Production box.... Can anybody advice me, as what got wrong and why my data got loss in list ? Thanks,

Wow! Sorry you had to go through that. I can't think of a situation where this has happened to us in the past. Sometimes if you aren't careful you can create new promoted properties for everything but it still should list the XML forms in the library. I'm assuming you are using a library and not a list since SharePoint list forms were first introduced in 2010. Be careful that you don't publish the form to an intermediate site and then back to your main site. Doing that will "strobe" (change) the GUIDs for the promoted columns and you will lose the data in the promoted columns. I'm guessing this is what happened to you. If you save the XSN and export the source files, open up the manifest.xsf in notepad and search for listProperties. Each property will have a GUID. If those change, you will see the behavior you saw. Typically this happens when you publish to a new site and then back. Since it will recreate the guids on each new publish.

Hi Patrick...Appreciate your wonderful Knowledge on this subject. Your solution was v. helpful. I will try it out and will ping you for any query. Thanks a lot!