InfoPath Dev

Hi everybody!

I would need some advice or best practices for deploying an existing Sharepoint Site Collection to another Site Collection on another Farm. My problem is specific to InfoPath Forms:

I have a form in which I access two webservices to filter dropdownlists and a Submit Button with a data connection to a Sharepoint Library.

The assemblies are in the GAC and signed with our company key. The webservices (asmx files) are copied into the Layouts-Folder of Sharepoint(C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS) and then I called the disco.exe and got the disco and wsdl documents which I edited to match the SP-Site relatively and copied it into the ISAPI-Folder. I don't think this would be a problem (because the URLs are retrieved by calling SPWeb within the two docs). Also the forms themselves are features and deployed when you do content deployment within SP. The problem are the data connections within the InfoPath form creation.

The Submit-Data-Connections and WebServices locations (speaking from the view of the InfoPath form when you click data connections and say receive data from ... or send data to ...) are in our case hard coded to our SP-Site. So you'd need to know before the Deployment of the actual site which web applications are in the specific Portal and where your Form Library resides which you pass the data from the InfoPath form. Furthermore you would need to deploy the webservices to a specific folder on the server.

Are there any ways to do the connections relatively to SP Portal? How could I deploy the site collection with the form library without changing the form for every deployed farm or site collection?
Are there any suggestions or best practices for this kind of problem?

I would be very pleased to know! Thanks in advance!

Martin

Hi folks!

 I think I have found a solution to my problem:

According to the InfoPath 2003 Help (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA010834751033.aspx)

you can change your Manifest.xsf file in the deployed xsn file and then change the location from your server-name to the new server name. So if you want to deploy it to other farms you may write yourself a program which extracts the xsn-file and manipulates the xml-tags in the manifest to change the destination of the Webservices, data sources and furthermore the strings.

 Maybe somebody knows a better way to do this (via xslt?)

 Best regards,

Martin