InfoPath Dev

I recently encountered a really bizarre form submission situation.

I have a form with several digital signature blocks that saves itself to SharePoint, and interacts with a database through a WSDL when it is submitted. Except for a couple of XML file data connections, those are the only data connections I have in this form.

We received a report from a user, however, that upon submission, the user was taken to their Outlook client, and an email was automatically drafted, with all form contents (controls, text, and everything) as the contents of the email. It's as if the body of the email is the same as the web view would be for this form (though it's not a web-enabled form, by design).

Has anyone else ever encountered a situation like this?

My hypothesis was that there potentially existed somewhere deep in the damp, cold cavern of InfoPath settings, something that stated a default Submit option, but after researching, no such thing seems to exist either.

This has happened to the reporting user on more than one occasion, so it also doesn't seem like a COMPLETE anomaly. It seems to be isolated to this particular user, though.

There is an email submit connection set up somewhere and some rules or code somewhere that are causing this. If you'd like me to take a look at the template, you can attach it under options to a reply.

If only I were allowed to do so, I would.

I'll take another look at everything, but I'm 99.9% positive that this form template contains no instructions to send anything as an email.

I double-checked my data connections box; no email connections there.

And no issues for any other users using the form.

I'm at a loss.

Does the form have custom code? Save it as source files and look for a file with a .dll extension.

 No custom code.

Any chance the user in question has an old version of the form that does have an email submit connection in it cached on his / her machine?

Hilary Stoupa:

Any chance the user in question has an old version of the form that does have an email submit connection in it cached on his / her machine?

 

No, we have a version number within the form data; it's current.

A little bit of an update. I found in my InfoPath 2010 settings two options enabled:

• File -> Form Options -> Filler Features -> Enable Features -> Sent to Mail Recipient
• File -> Form Options -> Email Attachments -> InfoPath e-mail forms -> Enable InfoPath e-mail form functionality for this form template

Pretty much everything else is disabled.

Now, prior to recently upgrading from InfoPath 2007 to 2010, I explicitly went through all the form settings for this form template (created with 2007) disabling anything that I didn't need, including saving and emailing functionalities.

I wonder if in the upgrading process, these settings were enabled automatically.
In 2010 InfoPath, even with these options enabled, when filling out the form, I can't figure out a way to actually send a form email as the user described.
In 2007 InfoPath, however, this option still exists in the file menu for sending an email to a recipient.

But, the user in question claims that they didn't open the form through the InfoPath client, but that by clicking a link in an email to the .XML form, it was automatically opened in an Outlook window.

Does OUTLOOK maybe have some kind of setting that would cause this?

Not that I know of. This is sporadic? Or happens all the time for this user? Is it reproducible on another machine? That is, if this user logs into another machine with his / her account, and clicks the link in the same email, what happens? Is it reproducible on the same machine?

This user has submitted two forms like this to us, and I'm fairly certain that this is a reliable failure on her own machine; I don't know, however, what would happen if she tried a different machine.

I'll run some tests today.

Thanks, Hilary

Take a look at the hyperlink she's clicking too, just to see if there is anything different there - the only time I've see these message dialogs come up is when the form has an email submit connection, which is why I'm baffled. But generally, when I see anomalies like this, I start trying to narrow down form vs. user vs. machine. So a little testing may help you with that....

I set up a test environment for the user with one form that was a copy of the current production form that has the email settings enabled, and one form with the email settings all turned off. I set up similar forms that were both emailed to her as the others would have been (using the same SharePoint workflow, in fact). She tested them both. I was expecting and hoping for different results between the two, but they actually both SUCCEEDED...

Apparently the problem is intermittent, or at least not reliably reproducible. At the very least, the changes to the form that I've made (to disable all email capabilities) should prevent this from happening in the future if it ever even would have happened again.

lol thanks for your time!