by michaellotter19. December 2008 14:39This week has been one crazy week for me because Christmas is next week and I’m technically on vacation now for the next 3 weeks. Just like almost everyone else I've been scrambling to get as much work finished before leaving and I had several projects at once pushing for everything to be released by today (Friday). This unfortunately caused for some oversight on my part and caused a lot of little interesting problems to pop-up. One problem that I had was with InfoPath and Data Connections. During the course of my current project the SharePoint Site Collection where the forms were being deployed and Data Connection files being published changed because of Information Architecture had been modified to include "Forms Centeral" and yesterday I ran into this nice error.
“Relative links to Data Connection Libraries located in different SharePoint site collections are not supported”
It didn’t take me long to figure out what the problem was but it was the first time I ran into it and I wanted to mention it. The error message was dead on and I was getting this because I was referencing 2 site collection data connection libraries. I had 2 data connections pointing to the old site collection and one to the new one. After changing the reference everything started working again with no errors. Since I’m publishing all my InfoPath forms into a single Site Collection I decided to keep all my Data Connection files local to that site collection and not publish them to IPFS data connection library in central admin and when I switched site collections I didn’t update the forms data connection references.. You might be saying that this should have broken right away and in normal circumstances it probably would have but I had the “Allow cross-domain data access for user form templates that use connection settings in a data connection file” option selected on IPFS "Configure InfoPath Forms Services" page and this allows for cross site collection Data Connection and Form Library usage.. It’s turned off now that way I don’t have any more problems like this in the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about submitting InfoPath forms across site collections or even web applications you should come out to the spring SharePoint Connections in Orlando because I’ll be doing a session on this very subject. This is will be my first time speaking at SharePoint connections and I really excited about it.
Well it's that time of the year again and I hope that everybody is all ready for the holidays and if not you still have a couple days left. I’m heading back home from New York to get ready myself and then we are spending Christmas with my folks. I’m looking forward to it because I’ll be getting a really good home cooked meal and see everybody in the family. My brother Mark, who just got back from Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, will be there to. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen him since he shipped out in early spring. This Christmas is shaping up to be a good one for me and I hope everyone else a great one to.
Cheers