InfoPath Dev

I have a form that was developed by two different consultants over a two year period. The organization of the fields, field naming, grouping, etc. is in complete disarray. This makes further development in the form confusing.

I'd like to organize the fields into folders and possibly do some renaming as time allows. When I try to move a field I get the prompt, "This change will rename, remove or modify a field stored in this form. Existing forms that have been filled out will lose the data stored in this field. Do you want to make the change?"

Is this true? Will simply moving fields into folders cause me to lose data?

If so, what should I do to try and organize the form fields?

Thanks in advance,

K

 This is true. If you try to open the existing XML with the form after moving the fields, you will lose data.

Unfortunately, there is no simple way to approach this. You could:

1. Branch the form - clean it up, create a new library that uses the new form and leave the old form with the old library
2. Branch the form and instead of using a new library, set up your old library to use content types so the old XML use the old form and the new ones can use the new form
3. Write an XSL transform that you can use to update all the old documents to the new schema

Thanks Hilary! I'll give option 1 a try.

Hi, I am fairly new to infopath, and I am taking over a form that was previously developed. The fields were not organized appropriately to say the least. The forms publishes data into sharepoint library and this library already has quite a few records. I would like to organize the fields and their appropriate group folders, but I would not want to lose the information already in the forms/sharepoint. Can I implement option 2 of your previous answer? ANd could you give me any ideas on how to do it? Thanks, V/R Juan