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..?