InfoPath Dev

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to improve performance of opening an InfoPath form from SharePoint. My client's environment/intranet has proven to be pretty poor performance wise.

I know it is not the loading of form, data connections, rules, etc. that is slowing loading performance. I was able to test this by dropping an Alert into the load event handler. The user's experience will be they will wait 20 seconds, the prompt will be shown and 2 secs later, the form is ready for edit. I have verified that the form has been cached. Prior to me seeing my prompt, it seems that every time the form is opened from InfoPath there seems that the template is being downloaded.

Any ideas???

Do you have any role specified views on the form, being validated by the AD? I've found that this can slow down the loading.

Nope. We are seeing the performance issues prior to any code being executed (as far as I can tell).

On a side note, we were using AD to retrieve user information via a web service but abandoned it because performance of the LDAP query was terrible. He to re-implement the user verification to pull from a DB.

Hi Jason,

Do you have a lot of event handlers in your code behind?

Regards,

Franck Dauché

Yes there are a couple. Specifically I have a couple event handlers. For example, there is a repeating table that has a list of parts. If the user enters in a part number, a webservice is called to retrieve all of the associated part information from a mainframe system no less :-) I understand that those events will be handled when the from loaded with pre-existing data. Although, I am seeing the performance issue prior to these events being raised.

At the risk of sounding silly here can someone give me a refresher on how InfoPath checks to see if the it has the most recent version of a template.

This is what I think I know. I believe the processing instructions in the xml checks the version number against the version number of the template in cache and if that version number is different, InfoPath will go out and get the latest version. In this case the InfoPath form is published on SharePoint. Am I correct so far???

Although, I do not think this is what is happening. When I watch the InfoPath form being opened from the SharePoint site in my client's production environment I see a pop-up titled "Opening" and it shows the path to the template "http://.../template.xsn" This leads to me to believe that the file is actually being downloaded to the client. I have also go to "C:\Documents and Settings\...\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache1" >> blown away the cache >> then open the form from SharePoint >> go back to the dir >> check of the form is now cached >> then go back to the sharepoint >> press the fill out form button again >> and see no improvement and this "Opening" dialog is being displayed which is accessing the template.xsn publised to sharepoint.

Jason

OK, so whether the form is cached or not to start with doesn't improve performance. For the sake of arguments, can you comment out your event handlers (except OnLoad) and see if that has an effect?

Franck

Franck...the first thing I am going to do in the morning is see if I can just publish a completely dummy form, with NOTHING on it, and see if I can prove if it the network. Still I find this "opening" dialog very interesting and would like to learn a little bit more on what it is all about.

I just posted this article, hopefully it will help.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/infopath/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_ip2003_ta/html/officeinfopathtroubleshootperformancebestpracticeguidelines.asp

Yes, I have seen that. Pretty cool. Good move on your test. By adding features from a blank form, you will probably nail the issue.

Good luck and let us know what the outcome is!

Franck

Just opened the dummy form with nothing on it and I am seeing the performance issue. The first time I open it, it is slow. Again, I check the cache and a new form has been added. I then open it again, and performance is still slow. Plus this opening dialog is being opened that I refer to above. Need to figure this out? Guess most people do not notice it but on a slow network this is a big issue when you wait 15 secs for InfoPath to open.

Hi VT,
Thanks for the great link!


Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev

Just an update, we have determined that this is an issue with the network and it is being rectified.

quote:

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Originally posted by vt_asparagus

Just an update, we have determined that this is an issue with the network and it is being rectified.

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