InfoPath Dev

I know the subject I wrote is not that clear. Okay here's what I'm trying to accomplish. I have around 500 xml files in the sharepoint and my job is to create a new Infopath with the same fields as the old one but add three more fields to it. Once I publish the new infopath: It it is a old XML = I'm suppose to read all the old xml files and transfer to a new XML files that contain the old information plus fill the newly added fields with the old information (first 200 words). I'm out of ideas on how to approach this. I really don't want to do it manually, it's going to be a very very long process. Is there any good way to approach this??? Thank you in advance.... This is what I'm using: Window Server 2003, Office Sharepoint 207, WSS 3.0 , InfoPath 2007. I already publish the Infopath to the sharepoint.

Hi - InfoPath should already do this for you. You can add the new fields to your existing template, and under the Form Options, set the form to upgrade existing XML. You can even preview your form with some existing XML to see how it will behave (info here). Then, when someone opens the existing XML, it gets the new fields.

Hilary Stoupa:

Hi - InfoPath should already do this for you. You can add the new fields to your existing template, and under the Form Options, set the form to upgrade existing XML. You can even preview your form with some existing XML to see how it will behave (info here). Then, when someone opens the existing XML, it gets the new fields.

I'm able to upgrade the existing XML. But now what I'm trying to figure out is how to fill in the three new fields with the existing information for all the existing XML.

What I mean is: in the existing infopath I have a field called description. Now in the upgraded infopath I add another field called summary description. So my goal is to read the first 200 words in the description and filled that 200 words into summary description. I have to do this for the other two new fields.

I'm not too sure how to approach this problem. I would appreciate if anyone can point me to the right direction on how to approach this.

Thank you in advance.

I'd add rules on load to populate the new fields if they are blank - but I don't know of a way via rules to copy just the first n characters - how are you doing that in the updated form?

Hilary Stoupa:

I'd add rules on load to populate the new fields if they are blank - but I don't know of a way via rules to copy just the first n characters - how are you doing that in the updated form?

Thank you Hilary. I'm very new at Sharepoint so I'm still not very familiar with it.

This is what I did: First I add three new fields into the existing infopath template, then I publish the template to sharepoint after that I went to the Central Administration to upload the new form to the site. I checked some of the old XML files the three new fields are in there. One of the problem I have is that I try to enter something in the new fields and I'm not able to add anything, however, if I try to modified the existing one then I'm able to. And I'm able to fill out all the fields if I create a new one.

Note: I have not yet add rules to populate the new fields. I have around 500 old XML files in Sharepoint. So I'm kind of afraid to add rules to the existing code. I'm working on the test server so it will not affect the real one but still it's a pain to restore all the files to the test server .

Is there any way to read the old XML files and write to a new one as I read it? If add rules on load to populate the new fields is the only way then I will try to implement that in the code.

Thank you very much in advance.... :-)