InfoPath Dev

Hello,
A couple of years ago I created an employee form in IP 2013 and published it to a form library in O365.
Well, now my customer wants to make some changes but want to keep the info for any existing forms since there is employee data. So, any fields I delete from the template will also disappear on the old form after publishing, and any new fields I create will be blank on the existing forms.

I now have two choices:
1) Create a new form library on the site, publish a new form with the updates and change all hyperlinks to the the old form library to go to the new form library.
2) Change the existing form library to a content type library.

Option 2 is sort-of new to me. I've created a content library in the past with 4 completely different forms but I started that from scratch. I've never tried to change/convert a form library to a content type library so I'm hoping to get some insight/advice/pukka gen etc. from somebody in the know.

Grateful for any input. -Thx!

It used to be that if we set a content type as the default and re-linked the existing XML, they would use that content type. But I have a client using Office 365 where we just tried re-linking some forms, and that did not work. He's had to go through and manually associate the forms with the content type (can also be done via Power Shell) and then we will use the relink view to correct the href in the XML. So - I think I would try the following in a test library:

1. Create a simple test template that submits to a library, publish it
2. Fill out and submit a couple forms so you have some test forms in the library
3. Make an obvious change to your test template, publish it as a content type
4. Change your test library to use content types, set your newly published content type as the default

At this point, your new forms will use the form published in step 3. I think your original template will still be available in the library, however, and that the test items created in step 2 will still open with that original template.... worth a try?

Hi Hillary and thanks for your reply.

Long story short - my customer decided to go for a new form library with a new library view that has different calculated columns (while keeping the existing view as-is).

As always, your answers are much appreciated