InfoPath Dev

The form I have been working on has increased to a massive size, 200+ fields with multiple rules on each field. Well, eventually my form has decided not to publish anymore, with the message "This form can only be opened in InfoPath filler". Due to this I saved and closed it, hoping it would publish after I restarted InfoPath. This turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life, since opening the form again caused half of the fields and sections to be deleted, and several other sections rearranged in a jumbled mess on the bottom. What the heck is InfoPath doing to my form?

 I've had this in the past. There are various back ground files that make up an InfoPath form. Everything gets it self in a muddle and eventually breaks. Time for a brand new redesign from scratch.

Good to know I'm not alone in this :) But I'm not sure recreating the whole form is an option, considering the several months I've already spent on it. Do you mean that this would be caused by InfoPath glitching out because of the amount of content in the form? Sure seems like that! I am okay from going back to a starting point that's halfway and building back from there, but I can only hope that it will let me save my changes from now on.

I've not run into this before - any chance you'd email me a copy of the form so I could see the issue & see if it repros for me?

 For me it's not the content of the form. It's the constant saving, changing, moving and publishing that I think breaks the design of the form.

Sorry Hilary, I'd like to send it to get to the bottom of this, but I don't think I'm allowed to send out some of the information in this form. I think I'm looking at just going back to a working version and building it back from there. What I'd like to know is why this might happen, i.e. if there are constaints on the complexity of a form that would cause it to become unstable as wilkies0106aw mentioned.

 Like I said - I've not run into this, even with very large forms. Sometimes I'll do something silly like remove a data connection that is in use and end up with some errors that way - but usually either I've made such a mess I can't open in design mode (in which case IP usually provides enough info in errors for me to manually fix up the template) or I can design but get errors in design checker.

I have an update on this. I increased the timeout length on Sharepoint's web.config file, and now when I try to publish this form I see a more informative error message: "Multiple nested section types are not supported by Infopath Forms Services". This must be the cause of the problems. This is also discussed with some possible workarounds on this article posting: http://blogs.officezealot.com/bsandeman/archive/2006/09/22/13495.aspx Restarting InfoPath does nothing to relieve it. But even if I wanted to re-create the repeating sections on my Form, there are so many that how can I know which one is causing the error? Unfortunately the Design Checker doesn't seem to flag this, either.

I closed the form and tried publishing again, this time the errors flag in Design Checker. You may be thinking, "how is this related to the lost sections of the form"? Well, the sections that have errors flagged about the Multiple Nested Section Types are the same sections that were unceremoniously deleted by InfoPath. Unfortunately on Google there are about a grand total of zero hits on this particular error, and no apparent documentation on "multiple nested section types are not supported". Well for the Googling public's benefit and for those of you who need help with this error I was able to resolve it by doing the following:

1. Cut all sub-sections out of the offending repeating section with the bizarre "nested" error. (it would be marked with a red "x")

2. Paste them somewhere to save them in the interim. A fast way would be to add another repeating section below the broken one and paste them into there.

3. Delete that offending repeating section.

4. Publish your form again and watch it magically succeed.

5. ???

6. Profit.

So the problem was just that InfoPath was freaking out about unseen errors, and it was resolved by just re-creating the section. Nice.

 Euw. Thanks for posting what worked - it may help someone else who has the issue.

Thanks for the support on this Hilary, it helped me get through it by trying every route. I hope it does too, if not just to fill in the gaps on the error message since there's not much out there about it. I wonder what caused it, though. At least I know what to do if it happens again!