InfoPath Dev

Hello,

I'm not very experienced yet with either Sharepoint & Infopath especially. I know my way around and with trial & error made a infopath form and submitted it to my companies sharepointsite. The idea of the form is that it only needs to be send to a @mail adress and does not need to be saved on the site itself. I only published it on the sharepointsite so it's accesible for the whole company. Now i might (actually i'm pretty sure lol) have made a mistake wich gives trouble opening the Form from the shared @mailbox.

I had to replace the original form I made to another part of the sharepointsite. I made a new page, and republished the form from Infopath (2003) to that location (using the wizzard to create a new form library). After that I deleted the old page and old form library.

I made a button on the site wich opens the form automatically people can then fill it in and use a submit button and after a popup for confirmation by the sender, it is send to the specified @mailadres as attachement. There is no need that the form be saved after submitting on the sharepointsite itself. It worked perfectly.

It's after that i changed the location, republishing and adjusted the new path to the form, the trouble started. I have been trying to figure out what is wrong. The form cannot be opened anymore without a weird workaround. The person trying to open the attachment form the shared @mailbox gets an error it cant be opened because the location cannot be found.

After some fiddling around I found a weird workaround, the person wanting to open the form in the @mail needs to first go to the form on sharepoint, submit a new form, and then is able to open the forms send in by @mail. That has to be done once a day after that no submitted forms give an error when opened form the mailbox!?.

I tried deleting the form from the sharepointsite, republish it freshly, but the error keeps occurring. I have also found out that some people have saved the (old version) form to there personal hardrive and submit it from there. (So for the new version i turned off the save & save as function in the form option and only the send to @mail option is checked)

One thing i can think off that goes wrong now (though it did not before) In order to have a link for the button to open the form, I had to place the form itself via save as to my own harddrive, then upload to the form library, then delete it again from my local drive (got some other errors pointing to my local drive when opening form sharepoint)  and then republish again so it overwrites the uploaded form, to be safe. Pretty creative I think myself (and this worked well untill above mentioned relocation) it all got screwed up somewhere then lol.

What error am i making!? and what would be the correct solution for what I want from infopath & sharepoint described above to submit forms to a shared @mailbox via a direct "open form" button. (I could off course use word or excel to make the form, but apart from the trouble i'm having now, I find it much easier and neater to make a form via Infopath. and just want to learn it)

excuse any grammar mistakes, my English is a bit rusty.

thanks in advance for any answers & solutions

Pepijn Schreurs:

One thing i can think off that goes wrong now (though it did not before) In order to have a link for the button to open the form, I had to place the form itself via save as to my own harddrive, then upload to the form library, then delete it again from my local drive (got some other errors pointing to my local drive when opening form sharepoint)  and then republish again so it overwrites the uploaded form, to be safe. Pretty creative I think myself (and this worked well untill above mentioned relocation) it all got screwed up somewhere then lol.

I'm not exactly sure what to recommend to you, but I'm wondering if the problem is how you published the form.  There's 2 things you can do, you can Upload the form (which is the 'wrong' way - gives you the problems of the references to your hard drive) or you can Publish the form.  Now if you Publish the form, they have to click the NEW button in SharePoint to get a new form.  My concern is that if you uploaded it, that THAT is what they're clicking - i.e. they're seeing the form in the library and they're clicking on that and not on the New button.

Other than that, I'd have to try it locally.  If you can verify whether they're clicking New or not, then for further troubleshooting I can try to help by replicating the issue.

[EDIT] - In order to have a button that opens the form from, say, a home page of a site, all you need to do is to click the New button and copy that URL.  Furthermore, if you DON'T want the user to go to the "Back End" library, and instead you want them to go back to the home page after they click Close, then all you need to do is to modify the Source attribute in the URL to point to where you want to send them.

EXAMPLE:

https://yourSharePointServer/yourPath/yourSite/YourSubSite/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=https://yourSharePointServer/yourPath/yourSite/YourSubSite/Travel%20Reimbursements/Forms/template.xsn&SaveLocation=https%3A%2F%2FyourSharePointServer%2FyourPath%2FyourSite%2FYourSubSite%2FTravel%20Reimbursements&Source=https://yourSharePointServer/yourPath/yourSite/YourSubSite/default.aspx&DefaultItemOpen=1

They are not going into the library and select New. I am linking everyone to the same form over and over again so to speak. I thought that should not be a problem because it is send by @mail and not saved to the library. They just open a form to fill out and it becomes "unique" once send and should not influence the "original" blank form.

I link them to same form I "saved as" and uploaded to the library. If I only publish it i dont get anything i can get a href link from!?

I'll try today to create 1 new form via the normal way on the library and save that to link to and see what happens.

I chose this custom option because i know that it will go wrong, and there will be people that will not understand how and what they have to do, if i would send them to the library and have them choose new there. That might sound harsh about some of of my colleagues but i'have seen it go wrong to often even with a step by step picture how to. So i tried to make it as simple as possible, click a button on the startpage of our department sharepointsite, fill in the form, submit it and done. Sharepoint is only just being taken into more general use, and despite advertising and metioning it in meetings some people just do not get it they have to look at the site for important daily information, wich they wont be receiving by @mail anymore. They do get warning @mails though, but still.

Lol problem with the simple solutions i thought i figured out is, it is simple for the enduser but i tend to make it more complicated for myself.

Thanks in advance for any other suggestions.

Here is the simple code i use for the button on the page:

<DIV class=Button><A class=ButtonLink href="InsertLink">Button Text</A></DIV>]

I think I solved it. Thank you Sue for pointing me in the right direction. I found another code that auto opens a new form instead of having to link to one that is uploaded. This is what I have come up with:

[<a href="BLOCKED SCRIPTcreateNewDocumentWithProgID(escapeProperlyCore('http://{SERVER}/{SITE}/{LIBRARY}/Forms/template.xsn', true), 'http://{SERVER}/{SITE}/{LIBRARY}/', 'SharePoint.OpenXMLDocuments', true)">Create a New Document</a>]

I inserted this line of code into the buttoncode and put it in the sharepoint source editor. This is what the code looks like now: