OK – so for some reason, I am doing another IT related post.  This relates to Infopath 2010, with Sharepoint 2010 – and appending comments to the infopath form.

The past couple of days I have been beating myself up trying to fix this problem.  I have an infopath 2010 form that populates a sharepoint list.  Inside the form is a comments section (yes you guessed it – it’s an IT Helpdesk system) that has a read only repeating section in it, so the the IT guy can add a comment to the helpdesk task/job and it records it for the future.  I created this exact mechinism in the HR system I build in sharepoint, so I know it’s pretty simple.  However, the repeating section kept being overwritten by the comment, and not appending to the form.  So I checked the HR infopath form – and yes, everything identical, then trolled on the internet – and found people saying that you had to do it with code, or workflow etc…  But I know that I didn’t do it with code or workflow in my HR system, so it had to be in the frontend somewhere.

I played around with different ways to do it in infopath, and then thought I’d better check the settings of the column in the list.  Checked the column settings, and yes – “append” had been checked, so that was fine.  Spent “far too much time” mucking around, then went back to the column settings, and decided to “refresh” the check box – by turning off the appending, and then turning it back on again.  And wouldn’t you know it – it threw up an error telling me I had to have versioning on to append text.

d’oh!

At the time, I was thinking – I am such a DOOFUS!!!!  Turned on versioning – and now the infopath form allows appending of history…

On reflection, what a stupid thing to have to do to allow this, so tomorrow – I am going to play around with the versioning settings and see if an append means an unlimited amount of versions are required.

Is it just me – or is this another one of those – “why did they do that” moments..?

Wow – yup, it’s me, posting about a gotcha/bug/quirk/random/issue relating to our Sharepoint 2010 installation, infopath 2010 and IE8 vs IE9.

So I have an everlasting problem with my desktop at work, in that it is BSOD me once or twice (sometimes more) a day since Thursday.  It started after I got infected with some Windows 7 Security spyware, and then did a restore to a previous restore point on the PC.  Too busy to really fix it – until today, when I updated via Windows Update – and decided “to hell with the devil” and installed IE9.

If you know me – then you know that I love Sharepoint, so the first things I did once IE9 was installed, was to test drive it through both our WSS3 site and our Sharepoint 2010 site.  Everything seemed to be working… until…  I opened an infopath filler form published in our Sharepoint 2010 environment and recieved the following error:

How very odd – it worked in IE8.  So I went to our WSS3 site and tried an Infopath 2007 and 2010 Filler form – and it worked fine.  So I busted my arse hunting down the problem, tested with IE8 – which still worked fine, and then spotted that under the context menu for an existing form – that I could open it in either a browser or filler form.  Tried it in the filler form – and it worked – sweet.  So, into the > library settings > advanced settings > Opening Documents in the Browser

Here you have three options for the default open behavior for browser-enabled documents:

1. Open in the client application
2. Open in the browser
3. Use the server default (Open in the browser)

And – yes, ours was set to: 3.  Use the server default (Open in the browser)

Changing this setting to: 1. Open in the client application  – of course, fixes the behaviour… however – it doesn’t explain why IE8 user behaviour opens it in the client application, when it should open in the browser…  very strange, and a gotcha if you are using Infopath 2010 Filler Forms, Sharepoint 2010 and IE8 – and then upgrade to IE9 and wonder why your users can’t open forms anymore…