InfoPath Dev

I am looking for some best practices for handling changes to forms that are published to sharepoint.

Basically, this form is destined to change over time, and the lifetime of this form is probably 10 years, which means that we could see a lot of completed forms saved in sharepoint that would need to be updated as the forms change.

The question I have, is are there any best practices for handling changes to the schema of a sharepoint published form and getting the older ones to follow with those changes?

Hi Blackhawk,

Yes! There are several best practices:

1. Don't delete or rename nodes as that will cause schema invalidations and old XMLs won't load
2. Make sure newly added fields aren't required
3. If you must make changes that don't meet #1 and #2 above, create a separate form library and save the XSN there
• or, you can write a custom upgrade XSL to handle old XMLs (this only supports one version)
• or, you can write a custom upgrader that uses Import to support multiple old versions (cool but very tricky - see Chapter 7 of my book)
4. If you adopt a Web service product like our Qdabra DBXL Web Service Suite (which supports advanced versioning features), you can change the form over time and maintain all old and new versions without having to worry about upgrading the forms.

I hope this was helpful,