This for all you know administrators that have SharePoint 2007 installations and use InfoPath Forms Services. Josh and I working in our development environment on Monday and we had issues uploading, upgrading or deleting forms from InfoPath Forms Services. We could see the jobs in “Solutions Management” but not in the Timer Jobs but we also could manually get the jobs to execute when we ran “stsadm.exe –o execadmsvcjobs” command. We started to Google and everything else that we could possible think of but we didn’t have any luck until this morning. Josh wrote Jason Medero (brother) a long email about our problem and he said to make sure we had the DST patch installed. When we checked are environment this morning and we didn’t have that installed. So with little searching we found these 2 links that guided us how to install the patches and now everything works great.  We didn't have this issue in production because we installed the patches already but forgot to do it in development.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/16/sharepoint-faq-on-dst-and-october-9th-public-update.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/10/18/please-install-the-sharepoint-updates-on-your-server.aspx

The B&R team is  heading to Las Vegas for the SharePoint Connections and looking forward to having another great time reconnecting with old friends and getting a chance to make some new ones.  We had a great time last year picking up valuable tidbits from industry experts on how they were doing things with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in there beta environments during the day and then socializing during the evening and sometimes the early morning hours.  I think my favorite session last year was a pre-conference workshop that talked about how other companies were using SharePoint in their environments and some of the bottlenecks they were running into.  This was great for me because it helped me advise my past and future clients on possible trouble areas that I wasn't aware of.

This conference should be just as exciting because to my understanding there is suppose to be information on some of the new features of the next version of SharePoint.  I heard that the next version is coming out in 2009 but I'm not 100 percent positive.  I'm also thinking about attending some of the Silverlight sessions to learn more about that new technology and hoping to have a chance to work on a Silverlight project after finishing my current InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 project.

Well enough of me rambling and if you plan to be there and won't to hookup and talk about SharePoint, InfoPath or just have a drink and talk about nothing then just send me an email or post a comment.

 Cheers

Since I’m waiting on my plan again to Raleigh from Newark, I wanted to share the following little example.

Just recently we had a new form that needed to be built and it had a small unique design situation. The form had an area that needed the ability to have multiple rows and a single total field. The repeating row had a large dropdown list and 6 more fields to be scrunched onto a single line and to be honest there wasn’t a way to do this gracefully with a repeating table. The designer and I had a quick IM/phone conversation about it and we decided to do it as a repeating table but also a repeating section and then we were going to have the client choose the one they wanted. Naturally she worked her magic and came up with the following examples. The “Reason” field will be the one turning into a dropdown list. The items for this field are going to have the length of 25 characters (just trying to draw a mental picture for you guys).

Repeating Table:


Repeating Section:

When the designer showed me the forms I couldn’t believe my eyes how much cleaner the repeating section was. I knew the client was going to love the repeating section and I was right. Big kudos to my designer for creating another great form and I’m sure there will be many more to come.

For this form we were totaling the “Amount of Deduction” field and were having the total appear in the “Total Amount of Write-Off” control. The “Total Amount of Write-Off” is an Expression Box control and not a regular field. The Expression Box control used “sum(fieldname)” formula. We use the Expression Box control because it’s a simple thing to setup and we don’t have to worry about storing the total value.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and comments are always welcome.

For anybody that has looked at my blog before knows that I've been working with InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise and I've been sharing some of my experiences from my projects.  In a recent post I talked about using InfoPath Forms Services and using the Content Type that it creates for Form Libraries and today I would like to continue down that road and talk about SharePoint Site Columns.  The introduction of Content Types and Site Columns in the latest version of SharePoint has brought to the table another thing that needs to be understood when building an Information Architecture.  When you plan to deploy a large amount of forms for your organization it would be ideal to reuse existing columns as much as possible to help keep things more manageable.  What this post will explain is how to use existing SharePoint Site Columns from existing forms for fields that you're promoting from new forms to a Form Library.  Content Types and Site Columns are located on Site Settings page of a SharePoint site and can be found under the Galleries column.

Each Site Column is group by different categories and the one we are interested in is the "Microsoft Office InfoPath" categories.  Everything that is included in this group is currently being used by published InfoPath forms.  If you look at Site Columns and scroll down or change the Show Group drop down to the "Microsoft Office InfoPath" category you'll notice all the promoted columns from your forms.  In the example below you will notice that there is about 12 columns and most of them are unique but some are duplicates.  The reason for the duplicates is because 2 different forms promoted the same field names but didn't reuse the existing column.

Let's take this a little further now.  Let's say you don't have 2 forms but 100 forms and half those forms promote the Divisional Controller field.  Instead of having 2 duplicate fields all the sudden you have 50 duplicate fields.  From a supportability standpoint this would be a nightmare to manage but you might be thinking that still wouldn't be a big deal because nobody comes to this page anyway and it doesn't effect anything in the libraries.  Well this is not the only place you would run into this problem.  You would also have issues in Form Libraries that have multiple forms specified.  The forms would have duplicate columns and these columns would show multiple times even in the form libraries.  The example below shows 3 forms and 2 of the forms reuses columns but the third form doesn't.  Could you imagine what this would look like if you had 4 or 5 different forms specified for this library and didn't reuse existing columns.

Enough of me telling you what could happen if you don't reuse existing columns and let me show you how to reuse columns from InfoPath designer.  In InfoPath there is two ways to promote fields as columns.  One way to promote a field is by using Property Promotion option in Form Options (Tools->Form Options->Property Promotion).

The Property Promotion allows you to specify what fields you want to Add, Remove or Modify.  Whenever you add a new field you get the below popup that lets you choose what field to promote but it doesn't give use the ability to choose from existing columns from a SharePoint site.  But if we look at this popup a little closer it gives you a secret message at the bottom where it could be done from. 

It tells us that other options are available on "Select a Field or Group" screen when publishing the form.  These extra options are what give you the ability to choose existing Site Columns from the Web or Site Collection that you are publishing to.  When you are publishing to InfoPath Forms Services it's really important to add the URL where the form will be activated to even though you are publishing the template initially to the file system.  It's important because this where the list of Site Columns comes from.  If fields have already been promoted then highlight the field you want to change and click the Modify button.  The "Select a Field or Group" popup will appear and now you'll have the "Site column group" and "Column name" fields. 

By default the "Site column group" field will have "(None: Create new column in this library)" and if you click the drop down then it will list all the existing groups.  If you scroll down you'll see "Microsoft Office InfoPath" and when chosen the "Column name" field changes to a dropdown list box and lists all the existing columns that you can choose from.  If you choose one of the existing columns then the form will use it instead of creating a new one when the form is activated.  InfoPath will remember the column properties that you set and it won't be necessary to do it again.  If the column doesn't exist then use the original setting and the column will be created but when you republish the form make sure the settings are updated to point to the existing column.  If not another column maybe created and you'll end up having duplicate fields.

Once the columns are created SharePoint gives the flexibility to create a new group in Site Columns and change the column grouping.  This has been done with several clients in the past and groupings are usually done by line of business or something else that is logical for that company.  Using Content Types and Site Columns has really helped my clients streamline and organize the forms in SharePoint and keep the maintenance down to a manageable level.

As always if somebody has anything to add please post a comment because I'm always looking for opinions.

Cheers

This week has been a pretty interesting week for me so far because I'm training a new guy on InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services and we are getting new errors and I wanted to share one of them.  "There has been an error while loading the form" was an error that we got today when launching one of his forms.

After doing a little investigation we discovered it was a old form that he deployed and activated to a Site Collection through InfoPath Forms Services but then decided to remove it from InfoPath Forms Services before deactivating it from the Site Collection.  I was pretty amazed that he was able to successfully remove the form before deactivating all instances.  When I looked for the deployment files in the Features folder they weren't there so it appears it was removed successfully.  To resolve the problem we delete the form entry from the Form Template library on the main site and deleted it from the Site Content Type gallery.

Cheers

Today started out pretty eventful because I got a couple emails from an existing client that was getting really strange errors from there SharePoint 2007 environment.  They were telling me that they were getting the following errors whenever they were trying to add new data to their SharePoint sites. 

Error - Unable to complete this operation.  Please contact your administrator ......

Error - Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E14 ... ...

The errors that were sent to me did not really tell me anything but when they told me that they were unable to add, change or delete anything that was when I knew it had to deal with SQL being out of space or something like that.  After a little investigation I confirmed that the data drive was completely empty and the reason was because the SQL maintenance jobs.  The old SQL backups were not being deleted and after a period of time they ate up all the hard drive space (276 gigs).

Over the last several years I've seen this problem several times and most of the time it's because of miscommunication with the DBA group or just configuration of the SQL maintenance job. When I'm working with a customer we always sit down and create a database backup strategy for the SharePoint environment if they want or need help with it.  In my opinion this step is just as important as anything else.

Cheers

When using InfoPath forms as Content Types you're bound to run into the error "Content Type is still in use", when trying to remove an existing InfoPath as a Content Type.

From my experience you will not be able to remove any InfoPath form Content Type from a Form Library that has submitted InfoPath forms based off that Content Type.  If the library is using multiple InfoPath form Content Types you can go into the Form Library Settings page and update a property for it not to show.  From the settings page locate the "Content Types" section and then click the "Change new button order and default content type" link.

From the "Change New Button Order and Default Content Type" page uncheck the "Visible" check box for he form you no longer want appearing on the Form Library "New" button.

If this InfoPath form is the only Content Type for the Form Library then you can go and edit the Form Library security and not allow any new forms to be added.  The Form Library security link "Permissions for this form library" is located on the Form Library Settings page under the "Permissions and Management" section.

Earlier this year, I also discovered that you can remove the "New" button from the Form Library toolbar by blanking out the library form "Template URL". This property is located on the "Advance settings" page and is only available when "Allow management of content types?" property is set to "No".  I'm not sure why you're allowed to do this but I thought I would share it because it was something interesting.

Cheers

As I posted earlier I was attending and speaking at the South Carolina Code Camp this weekend and I'm proud to say that the code camp was a great success, at least I thought so.  I was able to meet a bunch of new people and some old friends.  It was a great time.

On a personal note the 2 sessions that I did on InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services and .NET went better than expected from the speaking standpoint but had technical problems with my VPC image and Vista but I was able to overcome the hurdles.  Having this opportunity to speak exceed all my expectations and hope to have another chance in the near future.  I would like to give Murray Gordon a special thank you for giving me this chance.

Cheers

Just last week an old existing SharePoint 2007 environment was re-introduced into the InfoPath development process for my current client and this morning when trying to preview a form either through InfoPath 2007 designer or InfoPath Form Services and using the InfoPath function "UserName()" the below error was given (error when viewing through InfoPath 2007).

The full error message is

InfoPath
Your user name cannot be verified because the form's security settings do not permit it.
Error occurred during a call to property or method 'get-UserName'.

The problem started to happen when the "Domain" textbox on the "Preview" screen and "Enter the URL of a server that is running InfoPath Forms Services and can be used to verify compatibility" textbox on the "Compatibility" screen from the "Form Options" menu was set to point to the development SharePoint server.  Below are visuals of the options that I'm talking about.

The error sort of took me back at first because there weren't any problems with any of the previous forms.  Since this was a new form I was thinking that there was a setting that was not correct but that wasn't the case.  While troubleshooting the issue I changed the form security to "Full Trust" from "Domain" and everything was working but I knew that wasn't the solution but it got me thinking in a different direction.  It got me thinking that it wasn't an InfoPath problem after all.  To further that theory I changed "Preview" and "Compatibility" values to point to production and when I previewed the form everything worked with no errors.  This confirmed my theory in my mind that it wasn't an InfoPath problem and I started to think what else is tied into InfoPath. 

So naturally I thought it could be an IE issue because we all know that IE is an integral part of InfoPath. The first thing that I did was open each SharePoint site that I was using in IE and looked at the security zone for each site.  To my surprise there was a difference between them.  The production site had "Local Intranet" and the development site had "Internet".  You can easily tell this by looking at the bottom right corner of the IE 7 browser.  After noticing this I added the development site to the "Local Intranet" zone and then tested my InfoPath form out again and there were no errors this time.

This error was a first for me since I started blogging everything on my experiences with InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint for my current project.  I started to really think if I ran into this problem before and I'm thinking that it might have happened with InfoPath 2003 when building custom forms for a client or on an ASP.NET project but not a 100 percent sure.  I'm just really glad it wasn't a hard error to figure out.

Cheers

After spending the last 6 months working with InfoPath 2007, "InfoPath Forms Services" and "Content Types" you start to understand lot of the different possibilities that are avaliable and I think it's pretty amazing on how versatile InfoPath 2007 forms are when used as Content Types in conjunction with InfoPath Forms Services.  In the old days which really aren't that old you only had one true way to publish an InfoPath form for viewing from SharePoint but know that has all changed with 2007 version.  Now you have 3 different ways of doing it if using SharePoint Enterprise and InfoPath designer.  You can still publish an InfoPath form directly to Form Library but now you can also publish a form as "Site Content Type" or "Administrator-approved form template" for uploading into "InfoPath Forms Services".  The third option is only available when the "Enable this form to be filled out by using a browser" is checked.  See image below for the actual details for each option.

The "InfoPath Forms Services" approach has pretty much become my favorite way because the SharePoint Administrator has control of which SharePoint Site Collection the form is activated in and the form is also gets installed as "Site Content Type" (Site Collection Feature).  By using this approach with the "Collaboration Portal" template it appears automatically in the central "Form Library" that is automatically created.  This gives everyone one central spot to access all the forms for that site. Clients that I've worked with think this is a dream come true because all forms can be stored and organized in one central location.

Now anybody that uses InfoPath all knows that most forms will need a place to reside once the form has been filled out and submitted for viewing the promoted form data or just viewing the submitted forms.  The above approach doesn't give this capability but just a way to launch the form.  When creating a new "Form Library" for an InfoPath form it can be done from InfoPath designer or specifying the form as a "Content Type" for a newly created library.  The first approach requires additional work from InfoPath and not to ideal from a support aspect because you would need to keep up with 2 instances of the form and this leaves a lot of room for potential problems.  If the form is added to the "Form Library" as a "Content Type" then there is no additional work besides selecting the form from the "Content Types" section on the form library settings page.

If the "Content Types" section doesn't appear then most likely the "Allow management of content types" is not set to yes.  This property can be found on the "Advanced settings" page and this link is available from the form library settings page.

You might be thinking how or when was the form published as a "Content Type" because you didn't specify it to be done because you only uploaded and activated it from "InfoPath Forms Services" in Central Administration.

When the form is activated with "InfoPath Forms Services" to the specified site collection it is automatically added as a "Content Type" (Site Collection Feature).  Now there are no worries about keeping the form in "InfoPath Forms Services" and form library in sync because it uses the same form.  While the form is specified in two different areas it will give the user the capability to launch it from either.

This approach might not be 100% ideal for all instances but it brings great flexibility that was missing.  For a future post I'll try to put together a series of screen shots on how to publish a InfoPath form to be uploaded into "InfoPath Forms Services" and also add it as a "Content Type" to a form library if there is a interest

Cheers