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Re: How do you upgrade a form in production with changes?

Skarn — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 22:58:42 GMT

As Hilary say, if you have automatic upgrade options set, when the old forms are opened they should display based on the new template.

Some 'useful to know' thing I've found:

Make sure you use 'Publish' and not just 'Save' the new template over the top of the old one.
The new template should be in the same published location - otherwise the old forms will just open and display using the old template - or if you've deleted the old template (!) they will error, or if lucky display using the users cached template. This is because the location of the template the form.xml expects to use is saved inside of it.
If you need to move a published template to a new location, the old forms will still look in the old location, they need to be 'repointed' - I *think* this may still be a manual process, there is bound to be various posts on how to do this, or even a tool.
If the changes/upgrades add new fields to the main datasource, then they will likely be blank or the new default value when old forms are upgraded.
The old form.xml's may need to be saved again after opening to confirm the upgrade changes, otherwise each time it's opened it may need to 'upgrade' itself.
When you publish the new template, also change the 'form name' (this box displayed when you select which folder to publish the form to. I use <formName>_v1, v2, v3 etc. This seems to help force the upgrade and stops the user being prompted with 'replace or keep form template' type questions when they open an old form.
Some drastic changes to datasource structure can make old forms not open at all with the new template. A typical error I've seen when this happens is 'blah blah node is unexpected according to schema' or something like that. In these cases old forms may need manual adjusting/xml transforms to make them compatible with the template again.

Re: How do you upgrade a form in production with changes?

Hilary Stoupa — Thu, 26 May 2011 15:15:09 GMT

This should be something you can set under the Form Options (Tools menu in IP 2007, File / Info in IP 2010). In the Versioning category, you can choose whether to upgrade the XML when opened with a new template. Is that set?

How do you upgrade a form in production with changes?

shshsh — Thu, 26 May 2011 14:36:09 GMT

Hi,

So I have a form in production. I was asked to make some very minor changes and then get the new form into production and also to upgrade the existing forms to the new one.

So far the new form is available if i select new from the infopath form library.

Opening a form created before the form upgrade to see if it has the recent changes shows that it does not.

What do i need to ensure so that the new form upgrades the existing ones??? Same file name? Same URN??? Anything else? There aren't that many options as far as i can see but it just does not work.

Thanks