Floating Attribute Error (2003/2007Not Both Installed)

abcolson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:10:00 GMT

I am working with InfoPath 2003 SP2 using managed C# code in VisualStudio 2003 .Net 1.1 with a SQL Server data connection.

I had a wonderful form almost complete and working several days ago and then all of a sudden rules wouldn't work, I had duplicate attributes and the forms wouldn't load properly (If those errors sound vague it comes via courtesy of the InfoPath error messaging system :) )

After making a backup copy of my project and stripping it down to almost nothing I now get the error

Form template: file:///C:\develop\EpiTools\source\EpiAll\forms\Risk%20Management\Occurrence%20Reporting\Equipment%20Incident%20Report\manifest.xsf
InfoPath cannot open the selected form because of an error in the form's code.
A floating attribute may not be passed as the context node for an XSLT transform or an XPath query.

After reading the archives it appears that this error sometimes comes from having InfoPath 2003 and InfoPath 2007 both installed on the same machine. This is not the case with me, so I am baffled. My manifest, schemas, etc. look ok to me, so I cannot figure out where the error is coming from.

Additionally, I am not even sure what a "floating attribute" is if it isn't just any generic attribute caught by xsd:anyAttribute.

The template is urn based so I am wondering how I can completely "purge" the urn from my system and start over because I fear there may be some registry settings tying the urn to whatever the error is.

It is also possible that our IT department (or the Microsoft AutoUpdate) installed some conflicting updates. I saw that recently an Office 2003 SP3 patch was installed (for example) but nothing relating to 2007 (I noticed that on another project the System.XML libraries seemed to also behave a little differently so I had to fix that recently).

Since I don't have any idea where the error is and I don't want to clutter the real estate on the screen with everything, I will post code examples upon request.

Thank you
Tony

General

Floating Attribute Error (2003/2007Not Both Installed)