The Form has been closed. Or has it?

fooshen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:07:00 GMT

Developing with forms services, especially with Workflow; usually turns out to be a love-hate affair - it has enough twists and turns to put a bag of pretzels to shame. One of the most frustrating errors (gauged from the amount of "help needed!" posts in newsgroups) - the infamous "The Form has been closed" message, usually occurs to Workflow association, Initiation, or task modification forms. Upon closer inspection in SharePoint's log files, the most common message is:

"The specified form cannot be found".

If the workflow host (in this case, SharePoint) could not see your wickedly awesome form that you have spent the entire week developing, the first place to check is the worfklow xml file (workflow.xml, by default). We have all checked, double-checked, triple-checked the form URNs that was supposed to be the guy who will tell SharePoint how to locate our forms that has been uploaded from our workflow feature, but still it could not locate the forms!

One item of note is that we have to understand the difference when we "Save" a form template, and when we "Publish" them. Note that if you publish the form under a different name from the one that was saved, the Form URN is different between them. The URN that we need to specify should be the one that we publish.

Here's an illustration:

I created a form, and save it as "Test" in C:\. Subsequently, I published it as "Test Form" in C:\ again.

The Form URN for the saved form (if I did not close my InfoPath designer, and view the ID, this is what I will get):

And if I open the published form from C:\Test Form.xsn, this is the correct ID:

Cross check that against your workflow.xml, and you should have it ironed-out in no time :)

Additional tips: After deploying the workflow feature, you can find all the workflow-related forms uploaded from your Central Administration, Application Management, Manage Form Tempates -> Click on the form in question and view its properties. That will reveal the ID that will be "seen" by SharePoint.

If all else fails, here is a sure-fire way to determine your form's URN: rename the published form to .cab, double-click to open it. Extract the file manifest.xsf and open in notepad. Locate the xsf:xDocumentClass element that should be right at the top, and check the "name" attribute. This is your form's URN.

Enabling Digital Signatures in InfoPath forms created from pre-defined schemas

fooshen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:07:00 GMT

Recently I was working on some InfoPath samples for United Nation's Electronic Documents standards (UNeDOCs: http://www.unece.org/etrades/unedocs/), and one of the key requirements I am looking at with InfoPath is the ability to digitally sign the form. Sounds like a no-brainer, since this feature is given with InfoPath.

However, after I happily imported the schema into InfoPath and attempted to enable digital signature:

Ok, so InfoPath didn't allow me to enable digital signatures. What's wrong with my xsd?
A little click on the least-clicked button in InfoPath (that's the little [?] help button) and a quick search on "Digital Signature" reveals:

Take note of the... well, NOTE. "If a form template was designed based on an XML Schema, you can enable digital signatures for the form template only if the XML Schema has a node that is in the W3C Xml digital signature namespace". Well, that's compliance for you.

So, using the all-powerfull killer app (that's NOTEPAD.exe), I open the xsd file and added a new element for my digital signature and point it to the W3C digital signature namespace: http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#
as such:

<xsd:element name="DigitalSignature">
  <xsd:complexType>
   <xsd:sequence>
    <xsd:any minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" processContents="lax"/>
   </xsd:sequence>
  </xsd:complexType>
</xsd:element>

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/#sec-Versions

Voila, now InfoPath allows digital signatures on my form!

fooshen's : InfoPath 2007

The Form has been closed. Or has it?

Enabling Digital Signatures in InfoPath forms created from pre-defined schemas