I think I know the answer to this, but want to be 100% sure.
A department is trying to go paperless, and one of the big documents (currently in Word format) that is used each year starts off at around 40 pages. This document can easily double in size with the amount of information entered. There are around 15 copies of this document, which are unlikely to change from a template point of view, but there's an additional 8 copies that will very likely need changing in the future (such as wording, tables removed/added etc)
The department wanted to make use of SharePoint, with the ability to work on a document in a single location where users can edit the document in situ, instead of downloading, emailing and uploading.
Straight away, I thought of using InfoPath and found this 'guide'
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/6b2d54f7-41e1-4e05-977d-f69be0edd38b/publish-multiple-forms-to-the-same-library
I tried the 'guide' out and it worked perfectly. This would work great as a single form library could hold all the user edited/viewable forms, and each form could be created from the template document library. This, in theory, would allow for the 15 copies
of 1 template, and 8 various other templates to be created and held in one place (if that makes sense).
I spent around 6 hours re-creating the Word document in InfoPath, which ended up with around 3200 textboxes (that's not a typo). And this would increase as there are repeating tables. The file size is 167KB
This is where I think I know the answer ... could the shear amount of controls in the form be the reason why I run into errors when I publish the form? Using the publishing wizard, I get "An unknown error has occurred. The form template has been published
to the server but it can only be opened in InfoPath Filler".
From this, I can create a new document based on this custom content type, but when clicking on the "new" button in the form library, I get a "Page cannot be displayed". The staff want the form to be web-browser enabled.
The design checker also gives a warning ... "Could not verify the form template on the specified server" and "Could not verify the form template on the target server:http://insertsharepointwebsitehere.com/_vti_bin/FormsService.asmx. Make sure you are connected to the network and have access to the server."
This error doesn't appear if I create a much smaller form.
Annoyingly, there is no way I could of known before creating this form to begin with.
If it is a case of having too many controls, is there an alternative to create a similar end product?