InfoPath Dev

Good morning, I hope you are well. I've been working on this problem for about a week now and can't seem to find any solution to it, it's been quite a mission for me. I will explain it to the best of my ability, however, if you need further clarification please do not hesitate to let me know. So, I have an InfoPath form connected to a sharepoint library. Within the form there are fields that cannot be blank, and some fields that can (not many). I need to create a save button essentially which uploads the InfoPath form to the library (essentially neglecting the 'cannot be blank' rule when it is pressed) but would still like the fields to stay as 'cannot be blank' for when the user presses the submit button. Thank you.

Hi - I think I would try to leverage an additional field for this. It doesn't have to show on the form. I'd probably name it "Status". When the user clicks "Save" you could set the status to "Saved" and when they click "Submit" you could use submit rules to set this field to "Submitted" as the first rule action. Then, for the fields you've marked as cannot be blank, use validation rules instead. The rule would be, for example, "field1 is blank and Status is equal to Submitted". That way, your submit rules would first set status to Submitted and then would also make the field required. All that said, the user experience is pretty poor when you try to submit a form that isn't valid.... So another option would be to make sure the Submit button doesn't show in the ribbon and just format the Submit button on your form to be disabled if any of the fields you want filled out are blank :)

Hi Hilary, thank you for your reply. I just have a few questions if that's okay. Number 1, when you say "So another option would be to make sure the Submit button doesn't show in the ribbon and just format the Submit button on your form to be disabled if any of the fields you want filled out are blank" this is already a feature on the form. The form cannot be submitted if certain fields are blank, and I wanted to see if there was a work-around to create a button that essentially submits a field into a SharePoint library (the same function as a submit button), but ignores the validation rules that are already in the form which work with the submit button. Will the above option still work to suit my needs? Thank you for your time :)

So - are you using "cannot be blank" on the fields? If so - you will need to change that. Because in InfoPath, our only option to save data with button rules is to Submit, and submitting runs the form validation, which means that your new "save" button would not work. The only way to ignore validation rules is to set the validation so it will pass when the user clicks "Save" and fail when the user clicks "Submit" - that's why I was suggesting a simple approach of just disabling the "Submit" button if the fields aren't filled out, and change them to allow blank so your "Save" button will work. Hopefully that makes sense, feel free to attach your form to a reply under the Options tab if you think that will help me understand what you already have in place :)

Hi Hilary, thank you for your reply. Would you suggest then removing all of the validation rules? Also, how would I go about making it so the submit button is disabled until the form is filled out? Thank you so much for your support thus far :)

Well, are you using validation rules right now? Or have you just set the fields as cannot be blank? If you are not showing the ribbon, but your own "submit" button instead, you could just add conditional formatting rules to the button to disable it - if "this" is blank or "that" is blank, etc. I'm attaching a simple sample form that will hopefully better explain the approaches. Right click the linked file, save locally. Right click the locally saved file and select Design to open in design mode.