When using a new product a day never goes by when you don’t learn something new and today was no exception.  I’ve been working on 3 new forms and today I was making tweaks to a couple of the forms and after publishing one of them I ran into the below errors when trying to submit a new form to a form library.  The error messages that I was receiving  were really vague to for the actual problem.

InfoPath cannot submit the form.
An error occurred while the form was being submitted.
The form cannot be submitted to the following location: form library url
The site may be offline, read-only, or otherwise unavailable.
The thread is already in background processing mode. 

Naturally after getting the error the troubleshooting hat went on and I started searching the internet for a solution but unfortunately couldn’t find one.  Then reviewed the changes that were made before it broke and couldn’t find anything wrong.  Started to look at the error messages again and when I scrolled over to the right to view full URL a light bulb turned on because I noticed something that a previous client had a problem with.  My filename ended with a . (period) and that’s a big no no with InfoPath forms.  The naming convention for the filename is “event name - company name” and for this instance the company name ended with a period.  Once I removed the period from the end of company name everything worked like a charm.

For my client we had to use a rule to search the filename for illegal characters before the form was submitted and replacing them with a _ (underscore) or just removing it all together.  The approach was used because we couldn’t rely on the users to remember not to add illegal characters to the end of the filename.

Until next time.

Cheers,
Michael

When using InfoPath 2010 I’ve always found myself coming back to the “File” tab to do something and each time I come back I’m finding new things to talk about.  In my last post I mentioned the “Design Checker” section being tinted in red when the form had a error.

Today when editing an existing form to fix a layout issue I noticed that the “Publish your form” and “Design Checker” sections were tinted in a yellowish color advising me that my current changes weren’t published and form status was “Not checked”. 

When creating a new form the “Submit Options” was a yellowish color because a submit option hadn’t been specified yet.  I’m finding out that InfoPath 2010 is a lot more informative when something is wrong or not everything has been wired correctly.

There is just so many cool simple little features in InfoPath 2010 that has made my life easier and make me want to share it with others.  This year is now starting to shape up to be a good one.  Now all I need to do is find some InfoPath 2010 projects besides my own to push my knowledge of InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Cheers,
Michael