InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I hope someone could help me with this. I've been pulling my hair out since last week trying to convert and be able to view the manifest.xsf in Design mode in Visual Studio 2008.

We have a infopath 2003 project with code created from VS2005. Now we want to convert it to be modified in Visual Studio 2008 and infopath 2007. Our machine has VS2005, VS2008, InfoPath 2007, VSTA installed and enabled.

1. First, viewing the original manifest.xsf by design mode from windows explorer , I always get this message "This form template was published to one location and has been saved or moved to a different location. To ensure that forms based on this template work correctly, publish the template again." When I click OK, the form always opens in Read-Only mode.

 I have tried the steps found from this forum http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/p/13524/47948.aspx but after doing all the steps, I still couldn't view the manifest.xsf in design view in Visual Studio 2008. It is just showing as xml text. Whenever I try to opening the manifest.xsf with Microsoft Office InfoPath Designer, I always get this message "The file cannot be opened with the selected editor. Please choose another editor".

2. I have also tried this:

1. In Windows File Explorer, right-click the InfoPath form template and choose Design from the context menu that appears.
2. When the InfoPath form template opens in InfoPath, click OK to close the warning message.
3. On the File menu, click Save As, and save the InfoPath form template locally somewhere on disk.
4. The XSN should now open without any warnings, and you should be able to publish it.

**I am able to open the xsn file that I have just save without any warnings but I am not able to publish it and still cannot view in design mode in VS2008.

I always get this message when publishing the form "This code was created with one of the InfoPath 2003 Toolkits for Microsoft Visual Studio. InfoPath needs to migrate the toolkit project to a new format. Your original toolkit project will not be altered during the migration. To select your existing InfoPath 2003 project, click OK." I then click OK and browse the 2003 Solution and then I'm getting this message "InfoPath cannot migrate your project"  , "InfoPath cannot build the Visual Basic or C# code.", "InfoPath has encountered an error. The operation failed."

Our objective is to convert our old project from VS2005/InfoPath form 2003  to Visual Studio 2008 and infopath 2007 and then view the manifest.xsf in design mode in Visual Studio 2008.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Kishu

Is there a particular reason you want to use Visual Studio 2008 as opposed to VSTA? I have used InfoPath 2007 with VS 2005, and InfoPath 2010 with VSTA (InfoPath 2010 is only compatible with VSTA), but I vaguely recall hearing about compatibility issues between InfoPath and VS 2008.

Would VSTA be a potential option for you? I've found that it's generally not much more of a hassle than using it with a full-blown version of VS.

Regarding the errors you are encountering on conversion, one thing you could try is to use the Remove Code option in InfoPath to remove the code reference, re-add the code project (with the same object model), and then copy over the code. I'd imagine this should be relatively painless if you don't have a ton of code.

Thank you so much Jimmy for replying to my post.

We use Visual Studio 2008 on all of our InfoPath form projects so we can also debug the form at runtime. I did try your suggestion to remove the code reference and then re-add the code.

So far I've been successful and now able to view the infoPath form in design mode in Visual Studio 2008. Once again, thanks for your hep.

Hi,

Just a follow up question regarding this post.

Viewing the manifest.xsf in design mode, I always get this message "This form template was published to one location and has been saved or moved to a different location. To ensure that forms based on this template work correctly, publish the template again." When I click OK, the form always opens in Read-Only mode. Same thing happens when I open it in Visual Studio 2008. How can I make changes to the form when it's always opening in Read-Only mode? Thanks in advance!

Kishu

 I usually then go to File > Save As and save a copy. From that point, I use Publish > Export source files to resave the source files in the folder I started in. There is a reference in the manifest to where the form has been saved which can cause this....

Hi,

 I tried the solution suggested above but when I try publishing the manifest.xsf, I always get this error message:

InfoPath cannot build the Visual Basic or C# code. InfoPath has encountered an error. The operation failed.

Has someone encountered this before and how were you able to work around with this. Thanks

Kishu