Infopath Data Connections not site relative

Question

First of all, let me start off by saying the following about SharePoint 2010 and Infopath forms. Great idea, VERY Poorly implemented and documented by MS. For a developer to develop and deploy is a nightmare and I'm sure most of us here can attest. Also, this idea of data connection files is a great idea, but doesn't work well when moving between environments.

Anyways, now that I've got my daily rant out of the way, here with my problem.

The way I understand Data connection files UDCX's is that wherever you deploy your form, the Infopath form should automatically go and look for its data connection files in the relative location to the form. Is this not correct?

In my case, whenever a deploy a form (via Infopath self) to a new web, the dumbass form still wants to go and look for the udcx's in the old location.

I.E, Form UDCX's was originally in Root:

http://somesite/dataconnectionlibrary

. I then go and publish the form to

http://somesite/somesubsite

. When opening the form on

http://somesite/somesubsite

, I get a error as follow:

The following query failed: GetUserProfile (User: DEMO\Administrator, Form Name: BLABLA, IP: , Connection Target: http://somesite/dataconnectionlibrary/GetUserProfile.udcx, ....

What's happening here. Do I have to also every time go and change the data connection files when I republish? Because that would completely void the whole purpose of connection files.

Frustrated at the momemnt... Anyone with some advice?

Answer 1

I had the same problem a while ago, I wrote a blog article detailing how I came up with a solution.

http://blog.ianchivers.com/2012/10/packaging-infopath-forms-into-site.html

I ended up creating a Visual Studio solution with a feature to deploy the InfoPath form that could modify the data connections.

Hope this helps, Ian.