by michaellotter8. June 2010 14:29When 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