We recently ran into a problem with InfoPath browser-based forms in a SharePoint farm that uses “explicit inclusion” managed paths. The InfoPath form uses several secondary data connections to pull data from SharePoint lists into the form to populate drop-down controls. The form seemed to work just fine in preview mode, but when we published it to the SharePoint site and opened it in a browser we would get a series of errors (code 5566) and the secondary data connections would fail. Further investigation showed other errors in the SharePoint logs, and after a couple of days of troubleshooting and Google searches we ended up escalating the issue to Microsoft Premier Support.

As it turns out this is a known problem and there is not currently a fix for it. The work-around is to use “wildcard inclusion” on any managed paths, and in our testing it appears to work as expected. When we publish the same form to a site using the wildcard path, the secondary data connections work just fine and the form functions as designed. We have encountered some other strange issues in the explicit-inclusion sites, such as SharePoint Designer data view webparts losing their connection to linked lists, and while I’m not sure if it’s related or not we don’t see those problems when we’re not in the explicit inclusion sites.

If you’ve encountered this same issue hopefully this blog post will save you a bit of time and a call to Microsoft. I haven’t received a link to a specific knowledge base article, but if I do I’ll update the post. Here are a few links to other user postings that might help:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288905.aspx (see comment at the bottom)

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=33610469&threadid=33610468

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointinfopath/thread/851c5baf-1c81-482a-8776-f909b54da565/

One of our clients is doing a lot of development work with SharePoint, InfoPath, and SharePoint Designer workflows. We were running into an issue where publishing the form to SharePoint often failed, resulting in an error: “Updating content type failed”. After extensive google’ing it appears that a lot of other developers have run into this, but we couldn’t find a fix for it. A good friend came through last night with a great idea that seems to have solved the problem.

Symptoms:

• InfoPath form with ~150 data elements
• About 60 of the elements need to be attached to the SharePoint library
• We were promoting the columns to the library, and on publishing ran into failures about 90% of the time

Our best hypothesis is that the web service on the SharePoint server was timing out before the publish operation could complete. However, once we changed the way we’re publishing the problem seems to have gone away completely. The fix is to ensure all of the “linked” columns already exist in the form library, then tell InfoPath to attach to those columns, not create new ones. You can do this during the publish wizard process:

1. Click the File -> Publish… menu option
2. Select the first option “To a SharePoint server…”
3. On the next screen include the proper URL to the library
4. On the third screen select “Document Library”
5. On the fourth screen select “Update the form template in an existing library” and choose the library from the list
6. On the fifth screen you’ll have the option to add your columns. When you click the “Add” button, instead of opting to have InfoPath create the column for you (i.e. the “None: Creat the new column…” option), select the “This document library” option from the first drop-down, then select the appropriate column name from the second drop-down box

This seems to have completely corrected the “Updating content type failed” error we were having and appears to have cleared up several other issues. When our publish failed, we were losing all of the views, etc. which makes sense, as InfoPath was re-creating the columns. We were also seeing fields become un-linked in the SP Designer workflow. Presumably this will fix all of the issues and save us an incredible amount of time moving forward. Hopefully this tip helps you, and please leave comments for others if you can add any insight.