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The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available.

another situation and another problem that i found a perfect solution for it googling the error originally written by Mike - H InfoPath 2007 - MOSS 2007 - The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available. Whether you are working with forms in custom workflows - or simply trying to publish a form to a form library in MOSS so you can collect information from the user, you may encounter this error. Initially if you Google the error - you may find comments that state that you need to uncomment the following line in the web.config for the web application: <!-- <add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule"/> --> DO NOT uncomment this field. Many do this and the forms may work - and this appears to be the solution - but it is not the best practice and it is not recommended by MSFT. You probably have not created a Shared Service Provider and associated the web application in question with the SSP. MOSS uses the Shared Service Provider to allow / manage session state for a Farm - and specifically for the associated web applications under that SSP. CREATING THE SHARE SERVICE PROVIDER When you installed MOSS - the first thing you began to get familiar with is the Central Administration tool. Take a look at the following snapshot: Click here for a snapshot Notice on the left side - under Shared Services Administration , there are 2 SSP's - SSP Administration and SSP Services. These were created after the farm was...

How to accidently add an assembly to InfoPath 2007 Form and how to remove it

This is a really old post that never made it because I just totally forgot about it until I read Paul Galvin's post http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!609.entry and I thought it was still worth posting because it's such a common problem and most people don't know that it happens. So here it goes; The last few weeks I have learned so many things when working with Josh Medero ( Jason Medero brother). Josh has been helping me out with my InfoPath 2007/InfoPath Forms Services project and he has accidently done a couple of things that I've never done or seen before but that's totally cool because it has helped me learn new things about InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services. As you probably already know this post is about another thing that I learned today. If you're a developer and have ever worked with InfoPath 2007 forms then you've probably have added a button to the form and have accidentally clicked the "Edit Form Code" button and launched Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) and then closed it because you meant to click the "Rules" button. When the VSTA window was closed I would have never have thought it would actually create anything and especially if nothing was saved. For Josh it created an assembly for the form even though no code was added. He never knew that an assembly was added to the form and I would have never known it but he was having other issues with his form and he sent...

Speaking at the South Florida Code Camp on February 2nd

That's right it's time for the South Florida Code Camp and I'll be down there giving a new session on InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008. For this session I'm thinking about changing a couple of things around and doing some really new stuff that includes C# code for updating AD and XMLFormView control for displaying an InfoPath 2007 form. I'm thinking that the InfoPath 2007 form will be a data entry form that allows users to update their AD information. I've been thinking about this new presentation for a while and since Visual Studio 2008 was officially released I figured that I should also change up the InfoPath part. I'm really excited about building the new code and presenting it and after the code camp is over I'll post it on my Code Camp and User Group page. All the information about the South Florida Code Camp can be found on the http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/ website. From what I heard while at Philly Code Camp from other speakers this code camp is suppose to be as big as or bigger than the Philly Code Camp one. To see what sessions are currently on tap checkout the agenda page http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/agenda.aspx . The code camp is going to have 12 different tracks and that means tons of sessions. The "SharePoint/ Office" track already has my "InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008" session and "Utilizing Visual Studio 2008 capabilities for better SharePoint Development Part 1 and Part 2" sessions...

Visual Studio 2008 VSTO and InfoPath 2007 error when trying to run debug

On Saturday when I was adding my finishing touches to my demo for the Philly Code Camp I ran into an error with Visual Studio 2008 VSTO and InfoPath 2007. Whenever I tried to run my InfoPath 2007 form in debug mode I got the following error. "Microsoft Office InfoPath does not recognize some or all of the command line options. Exit and restart Microsoft Office InfoPath with the correct command line options" When I discovered this error and found out that it happened with a brand new project my heart started to beat a little faster (ok lot faster) because I knew the pressure was on to fix the problem before my session started. I started to do searches on the internet and I couldn't find any answers and then I did one final search and I found some link that talked about a similar error with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and another office application. It mentioned about updating Office 2007 with a patch to fix the error. After reading that I looked at the version I was running and notice that I wasn't running SP1 for Office 2007 and decided to install that and see if it would fix the error. Luckily I had internet access at the code camp and started the download and about 30 minutes later I got it downloaded and installed. Then I crossed all my fingers and toes and tried the debug mode again and it worked. By installing SP1 for Office 2007 fixed the problem. I'm sure there will be many more little things pop-up and if I run into them I'll be sure to post them...

Inspecting Logic and Checking Design of InfoPath Form

Inspecting Logic and Checking Design of InfoPath Form It is easier to inspect the logic manually in simple forms but companies use InfoPath not to create simple forms but to create forms in an easy and simple way. These forms can get quite complex and large. Once developed and deployed, there are different techniques that developers can use to track down errors but even at design time inspecting and fixing errors in the form can be a tedious job. Forms can have hundreds of nodes or may be 20-30 fields...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Using InfoPath 2007 Translate function to do what XPath lower-case function does

Several days ago Joe and I found ourselves wanting to make sure we made the InfoPath “UserName()” function return all lower case characters and we decided to use the common XPath function “lower-case” but was surprised because it didn’t work. With a little research I found that we could use the InfoPath “Translate” function instead. I must say that it’s a little frustrating that some common XPath functions don’t work and you have to find the work around but if you do any InfoPath development you come accustom to it. Below is what we tried that didn’t work and what we did that did work. What didn’t work: lower-case(xdUser:get-UserName()) What did work: translate(xdUser:get-UserName(), “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYXZ”, “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyxz”) Basically for “Translate” we had to specify every letter in the alphabet in UPPERCASE and then lowercase to make sure every character will get translated. For more information on “Translate” checkout this link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA012330391033.aspx and do a search for “Translate” for the official description (It’s towards the bottom of the page). If you foresee yourself using this more often then something to consider is creating a “Template Part” for this. It would be very simple because it would have two fields one called “translate_uppercase” and another “translate_lowercase” and each field default value would be the alphabet in the correct case. Then whenever you would want to use the “Translate” function you would...

Microsoft's SharePoint VPC: Successes and Failures

I thought I would get a dialogue going about Microsoft Trial SharePoint VPC. My new consulting company has me looking into it as a viable tools for proof of concepts and demoing purposes. Well, I have a few concerns. One, the VPC has a trial version of Visual Studio 2005, which the trial version does not install the templates for VS 2005 and does not have a command prompt for your use. Therefore, I try to install the templates for wss 3.0 but no templates are installed into VS 2005. So I can't build a web part(save for from scratch). I can't build a site definition or any of the like. I'm very discouraged by this discovery. I am currently attempting to get VSTA on the trial version to program with InfoPath 2007, but I am doubtful it will work... Please if anyone has attempted to use the trial vpc for such tasks and been successful or had the same luck as I have. Please post your comments here! Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Why the text on my InfoPath form is so large

Thursday was another good day because there were several things that reminded me of things that I already knew but hadn't blogged about. Anybody that works with InfoPath knows or should know that InfoPath is tightly integrated with IE and the below details is one example of this. In the last post I mentioned that I was working with a new guy that will be taking over my work and whenever he opened a form in "Design Mode" his form text looked so much larger than mine and at times his text would wrap and mine wouldn't. This morning it bothered me enough that we looked at what the problem was and we discovered that it was "Text Size" IE setting. Below images of the same form but if you look really close you will notice that the labels are different sizes. This is caused by the "Text Size" menu option being set at different levels. When we changed the "Text Size" menu option to be the same as mine then the forms looked identically the same. To change the text size in IE 7 click Page menu button next to Tools and then navigate down to Text Size and below is a screen shot of the Text Size menu option. The second image is another example of getting to the same menu option and is pretty close on how to do it with IE 6. This situation will most likely stay with me for a while because it will be something that I will won't to tell future clients to watch out for because it could truly be a issue help desks would need to watch out for. Cheers...

InfoPath Form Template Part data source appending to existing Main data source instead of replacing

This week I started cross training a client employee on what I’ve been doing for the past 5 months because I’m leaving the project soon and start to look for a new project. Yesterday during are first session we discussed InfoPath Template Parts and how to build them and use them with existing InfoPath Forms. One thing that was brought to my attention again was how it interacts with an InfoPath Form when an existing control is being updated. When I discovered this the first time I forgot to blog about it but this time I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity because I think it’s pretty important to understand if you are going to use InfoPath Template Parts. When building a new InfoPath Template Part you define the data source and then design the template part or you design the template part and let that define your data source. Once done you save it and then add it to the InfoPath designer when a form is being designed. At that point you then add it to the form and it magically appears and the new fields are added to the data source. All that is the straight forward stuff but now things start to get a little more complicated when you go back and modify the template part. If you go back to the template part and make a visual change (meaning not adding a new control that updates the data source) and save the changes and add it back into the InfoPath designer and update the existing control on the form everything works just fine. Now if you were to update the same template part but...

Error When Publishing InfoPath 2007 form

Was at a client site last week, the InfoPath 2007 forms needed to be browser enabled, so I performed the following steps: Clicked on the Tools menu Selected Form Options menu item Selected the Compatability category Checked Design a form template that Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Example of using a repeating section instead of repeating table for a InfoPath form

Since I’m waiting on my plan again to Raleigh from Newark, I wanted to share the following little example. Just recently we had a new form that needed to be built and it had a small unique design situation. The form had an area that needed the ability to have multiple rows and a single total field. The repeating row had a large dropdown list and 6 more fields to be scrunched onto a single line and to be honest there wasn’t a way to do this gracefully with a repeating table. The designer and I had a quick IM/phone conversation about it and we decided to do it as a repeating table but also a repeating section and then we were going to have the client choose the one they wanted. Naturally she worked her magic and came up with the following examples. The “Reason” field will be the one turning into a dropdown list. The items for this field are going to have the length of 25 characters (just trying to draw a mental picture for you guys). Repeating Table: Repeating Section: When the designer showed me the forms I couldn’t believe my eyes how much cleaner the repeating section was. I knew the client was going to love the repeating section and I was right. Big kudos to my designer for creating another great form and I’m sure there will be many more to come. For this form we were totaling the “Amount of Deduction” field and were having the total appear in the “Total Amount of Write-Off” control. The “Total Amount of Write-Off” is an Expression Box control and not a regular field. The Expression...

InfoPath 2007 and SharePoint Site Columns

For anybody that has looked at my blog before knows that I've been working with InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise and I've been sharing some of my experiences from my projects. In a recent post I talked about using InfoPath Forms Services and using the Content Type that it creates for Form Libraries and today I would like to continue down that road and talk about SharePoint Site Columns. The introduction of Content Types and Site Columns in the latest version of SharePoint has brought to the table another thing that needs to be understood when building an Information Architecture. When you plan to deploy a large amount of forms for your organization it would be ideal to reuse existing columns as much as possible to help keep things more manageable. What this post will explain is how to use existing SharePoint Site Columns from existing forms for fields that you're promoting from new forms to a Form Library. Content Types and Site Columns are located on Site Settings page of a SharePoint site and can be found under the Galleries column. Each Site Column is group by different categories and the one we are interested in is the "Microsoft Office InfoPath" categories. Everything that is included in this group is currently being used by published InfoPath forms. If you look at Site Columns and scroll down or change the Show Group drop down to the "Microsoft Office InfoPath" category you'll notice all the promoted...

A deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution ... Publishing InfoPath form

You get this error when you try to publish an already published InfoPath form in SharePoint: "A deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution ..." If you go into the event log, you will notice different error messages related to this event. For example, one message will be as following: EventType ulsexception12, P1 w3wp.exe, P2 6.0.3790.1830, P3 42435be1, P4 microsoft.office.infopath.server, P5 12.0.4518.0, P6 4541816a, P7 12961, P8 161, P9 nullreferenceexception, P10 8gec...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Null is null or not an object

Have you seen this error before? Did you find a solution? I was getting this javascript error on the click of a button that had a simple rule attached to it. Everytime I clicked the button, it produced this javascript error: Null is null or not an object. After some debugging, I noticed that the error was occuring in the "owsbrows.js". This file contained a line that was trying to load a value from the control that was clicked in the form. The control returned "null" and hence...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

InfoPath button with simple rule attached doesn't work!

I had a button in my form and there was a simple rule attached to this button. Rule was that If someone clicked the button, a (hidden) textbox would appear in the form, a very simple rule! Problem?? The button was not working. Somehow the event was not firing. I had this problem even before but simply changing the ID of the button resolved my problem but this time, changing the ID didn't work. I spent a couple of hours trying to find the cause but in the end, I needed a quick solution as I was...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks