InfoPath Dev

I have a n infopath form on forms server 2007 (MOSS) i am publishing a couple of the fields to the forms library for reporting.

 

I now want to publish some more fields. This is fine, i have republished the form and selected the additional fields to publish. I have uploaded the form template to the forms server but the new fields are not showing against the form library. The only way i can get the new fields to show is to upload the form under a new name but this then means that my old forms will not have these new fields published when they are reopened and closed.

 

Please help as this is causing me a major headache 

 

Thanks

 

buzz 

Are you talking about promoted properties? These new properties do not get populated automatically for old/existing forms. You will need to export (save) and then import those old forms back into SharePoint for it to grab those values.

What is happening is if i have a template that publishes fields to sharepoint that all works fine. If i change that template to ad in addtional fields that i also want to publish to sharepoint these new fields do not get published. The new fields appear in the form fine but it will not publish them. The only work around i have is to publish the template with a new name and upload to the forms server then add this "new" form to the form library as the new default.

 

I then have to go through every old form on the system using a text editor and change the form template that the forms points to.

 

I am only every adding fiields not removing anything.

First lets make sure we are on the same terminology:

"Form Fields" are those fields in your form template that, when editing a form, you enter data into. These are saved as part of the form XML or to a database.

"Promoted Properties" are those fields which you specify in your form template should be promoted to SharePoint to be listed alongside your forms.

 I believe you are referring to promoted properties here.

Promoted properties are sync'd on SharePoint whenever you "publish" your form to SharePoint. At the point of publishing the new form template, SP looks to see what fields are being promoted, and adjusts its current set of fields (i.e. adds or removes as required). When you update your template and change what properties are promoted, and then publish again, SharePoint is "supposed" to do those adjustments automatically. HOWEVER--it will not go through all your existing forms, saved to SP, and update the properties on those. This can be done by saving off your existing forms, and uploading them back to SP. At that point, SP will reprocess that XML file and pull out the appropriate fields to be promoted.

If this is not happening, then the problem most likely lies with the SharePoint installation. I don't believe there is any configuration where you can turn the feature off... so something else is wrong.

yes i am talking about the Promoted Properties. I have this issue on every MOSS system i have seen, I am currently using 2 different systems installed by different people and the Promoted Properties do not get updated if the form template is the same name. I am aware of the issue that previous forms do not automatically publish the new fields.

 

Is this a known issue with the product as it is going to cause me real problems soon? 

Hello

Yes this is a known Issue. As greg suggested you may want to save the old forms and then import them back to the form library.

Thats a pain.

 

Is there a way of saving the forms out or was my way of moving them out and changing the tempate name correct??

I've not played much with MOSS and SP07... but SP07 does have a "Relink documents to this Library" link. I don't know exactly what this does, but it sounds like it might do what you are looking for without the need to save out and back. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--which I probably am :o)

The fastest way to get this to work is to go to the Explorer view in SharePoint, select all the xml files, copy them then paste to a folder on your desktop. Then again copy all the files from the folder on your desktop and resave them to SharePoint. Then all the properties will be reextracted from the files. This is indeed a lame limitation of SharePoint that there isn't some button on the site to do this.

By the way, the reason why propery promotion is only done on file save and not when the properties are updated is for performance. A call had to be made to avoid situations where someone had hundreds or thousands of forms in a library then they promoted one extra property. This would essentially cause the server to have to do a reextract which could lock up perf on the server.