I am using some automation software that makes components available to aggregate and process data. One of the components is a Web DAV copy component, which copies files from say, a Sharepoint document library to the automation server. From there, it can process these files using other components. The WebDAV copy component works well to copy Excel files, and text files from Sharepoint. However, it does not work well to copy Infopath XML files.
The Infopath forms I am trying to copy are a pretty standard implementation of an XSN tied to a Sharepoint document library, where the user picks a New form, and saves it as an XML in the document library. Then I want to copy these XML files and process the data.
When the WebDAV component copies the file to the automation server, I can open the file in a notepad, and it starts with an <HTML> tag instead of an XML header. Going through the copied <HTML> code, I don't see any of the XML structure. In scanning the HTML code, it looks mostly like CSS and Javascript.
If I use the Sharepoint interface to copy the same XML file, I can open it in a notepad and see the expected XML data, instead of the HTML.
Is there some other way of copying an Infopath file from Sharepoint (such as SOAP) to get the actual XML instead of HTML? Or some box to tick in the Infopath form design that I am missing?
I am very familiar with promoting Infopath fields as Sharepoint columns, and this works well with the automation software. However, I would like to use repeating tables in Infopath, which seems to be incompatible with promoting Infopath fields as Sharepoint columns due to the unknown number of rows in the table.
Thanks for your help!
Shaun