Need help Updating form in sharepoint that was created with Infopath 2003
- Hello
I am an Analyst for a company and I built a SharePoint site that allows multiple departments send work requests to a single location. They fill out a form send the request and the users on my end complete the request and SharePoint alerts the creators when we have completed the work.
The site works nice and the Infopath 2003 form we built is fine. However as usual I got tons of feedback and changes need to be made. My new form is very differnt from the old one and has new fields on it and some old fields removed. This however will affect any outstanding work requests we currently have and the old completed requests.
I thought I could use a content type to create new versions of the template form however it appears this isnt an option with Infopath 2003. Is there a way to do this so I can upload my new form and still have the old files link back to the old form?
Answers
- Ok, so you used the InfoPath 2007 client to publish as a content type while it remained a 2003 template. That might be ok. Test it on a sub-site or dev site first to see if it behaves as you'd like.
As an aside, why are you still using 2003? Is your organization aware of it soon being 2 versions and almost 10 years old? I'm guessing you're fully aware and would rather not be reminded. =P
SharePoint Architect || My Blog- Marked As Answer byLu Zou-MSFTMSFT, ModeratorWednesday, November 04, 2009 9:40 AM
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To do that, you'd need to make a new form library with your new form template and close off use of the old library. If you do that, it would allow you to move to a fully-2007 based form and browser-enable it. You could also do full rich client 2007 forms if your users have Office 2007 as a standard, but that's assuming your users are not still on the 2-versions-old Office 2003.
SharePoint Architect || My BlogYou guessed it 90% of the users operate under Office 2003 and there are far too many users to request upgrades to Office 07. Also I cant create a new form library because that would reset the request number and I have to keep the data that is created for years to run metrics on. Some of the data kept in this DB directly affects employee eval's.
- You could force the request number to pick up where the others left off, so I don't think that's a limitation. As for metrics, you can combine data sources using Data View Web Parts in SharePoint Designer in order to have combined metrics from the two libraries. You also said "in this DB." Does that mean this data is being written to a SQL DB elsewhere, or are you referring to the form library as your DB?
SharePoint Architect || My Blog Yeah I am refering to the library as my DB.
I think I may have a solution, I havent tested it in production yet but I have a laptop with Office 07 and I placed a copy of the 2003 infopath form on a shared drive and then used my laptop to publish the 03 form directly to the contetnt type on the site. In my test site it appeared to work just fine I am just afraid to turn it on in production... yikes..- Ok, so you used the InfoPath 2007 client to publish as a content type while it remained a 2003 template. That might be ok. Test it on a sub-site or dev site first to see if it behaves as you'd like.
As an aside, why are you still using 2003? Is your organization aware of it soon being 2 versions and almost 10 years old? I'm guessing you're fully aware and would rather not be reminded. =P
SharePoint Architect || My Blog- Marked As Answer byLu Zou-MSFTMSFT, ModeratorWednesday, November 04, 2009 9:40 AM
- lol
Yeah I am aware. Like any very large organization we have lots and lots of working aps that use 2003 and still quite a few that use 97. A few areas of the company do use Office 07 but its a cost thing, we have over 40,000 employees and it takes years to roll that many changes out.
If I decided to on my own change this app to 07 I would be asking 6 departments to move appox 100 employees to office 2007. If I had that kind of juice I wouldnt be using a 5 year old computer to do all this. lol
I did make the change in a test enviroment. I do have 2 huge issues, all of the nintex workflows do not run even thought its being published to the list, and each field is now seen as a dupe in the views. So if the orginial form had a field named "fldNDC" and the new form has one named the exact same if you go into a view and change it you will see fldNDC and fldNDC1 as options.
sigh - You could built them in IP2007 and make them browser-enabled so that all users could interact with them without even having InfoPath.
Not sure on that last bit - it should not be duplicating fields. I would have to think you've crossed some wires with your publishing method.
SharePoint Architect || My Blog It wouldnt surprise me if I did....
I cant use browser enable because that would require me to be on a forms server and not on a collabration site. Our IT dept controls the Forms server and has a high price of admission and wants top dollar development dollars to do the most basic thing. When we started I asked about the forms server and was told that for just one small piece of our project it was going to cost 10K. Speaking of which I was able to do that task by myself in under 20 minutes for free.
Here is some detail on what I created and how I tried to go around the system.
The orginial doc library is based on a template that was published to it. The next version of that form resides on the main site (different from the doc library) and is tied to a content type. When I enable content types on the doc library I am then given the option to include the 2nd version. When I create a new item with this 2nd form it creates a dupe of each column as an option. So if you go the view you see NDC and NDC as an option. The same thing can happen if you remove a field you have previously used. For instance I have a fldclose and a fldClosedDate on another form.- You could also export the forms (Explorer View of the form lib to your file system), perform an xslt transform to change the xml to use the new form, and then upload the fixed forms.
/bac - Hmm, that's strange. YOu have a separate Forms Server instance? Do you guys have MOSS Standard or WSS 3.0 with Forms Server added on instead of using MOSS Enterprise? It shouldn't cost extra to "use" Forms Server, and it's not a "separate site" that can't be on a collaboration site. Maybe that's how it works when you add Forms Server to a non MOSS Enterprise system. With my systems, it's MOSS Enterprise, which includes Forms Services, and it can be used everywhere - there is no extra cost or restriction when someone wants to build a browser-enabled form. I had never heard of that situation before actually (the one you described).
Yeah, the way you've done this is not correct. You wouldn't do it that way. The content type brings in its own columns separate from the default content type. Why was it built this way?
SharePoint Architect || My Blog - Basicly the idea is if you want a website to show a picture or text then they dont mind us building a simple site inside sharepoint. If we want to do what I am doing then IT wants to capture development dollars and charge the department tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on developing a site. So to answer your question its all about control and budget dollars. Recently they purchased a suite of tools that are wonderful (nintex, quest) and turned them on. These tools are vital to the sites creation (workflows), again IT discovered how nice they were so they restricted their use and access to IT only.
As to why I designed the form in 2 different content types the answer is that you are talking to someone who previous to August had not even heard of SharePoint much less constructed anything in it. I did find a guy who could answer basic questions for me as I stumbled my way through creation. When I built the site I didnt understand that versioning would be an issue for templates. About 60-70% though my creation process the application that was the intended replacement died in a server conversion. This app is the main pathway for work requests to my department so even though the new app was incomplete it was far enough along to turn it on. Which was done on Sept 10th. Since then it worked pretty well and many folks were very happy with it since it had much better options and tools than the old version (Access DB tied to Visual Studio app).
It was when I went to implement changes that were requested that I ran smack into the versioning issue with the template. As I tried to make changes (overwriting the org template) it busted established views. Now I understand that if you have a item on the form it can never be changed or deleted.
So part of my problem is that my hands are getting tied by IT, and that I am forced to work with 2003 versions of software. Mostly what I am looking to find is how to properly update the form without busting views or having to manually refresh every single form every time I update the template. For the moment I have ditched the 2nd content type and am just working with my orginial template. If anyone has ideas on how to properly update that orginial template I am all ears...
Thanks
