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InfoPath 2007 Publishing to SharePoint: Updating the site content type failed

I’ve been struggling for a few days with issues related to InfoPath 2007 publishing to SharePoint.  I thought that I had tried everything.  I had tried publishing to a document library, as a content type, trying to modify content types, etc.  I got a variety of error messages including “Updating the site content type failed”.  This one was my favorite because there wasn’t anything in the content type that I asked InfoPath to update.

I realized later that it was updating the document template but I wasn’t thinking about that when I saw the error message.

Help Your SharePoint User

What I realized when I dug into the issue is that InfoPath 2007 couldn’t modify the content type because it had been created at the site collection level – not the subsite level that I was doing my testing from.  You can only modify a content type from where it was created.  When I backed up in the wizard and I gave it the URL for the site collection root rather than the sub-site and then rolled forward through the wizard again it worked.

So if you’re having trouble getting InfoPath 2007 to publish to SharePoint … try publishing to the root of the site collection. (I still have other issues this didn’t fix like the fact that a properly derived form isn’t showing up as one to modify – but one problem down.)

6 Comments

  1. We’ve been using InfoPath Forms Server 2007 on Windows SharePoint Services for over a year now. We have developed over 200 forms and store them in the Forms Templates within the Document Libraries part of our InfoPath site:

    As these forms are opened with Edit in Browser, they are Submitted using a data connection to a SharePoint Library and also sent to an email recipient. The SharePoint Library as you can imagine has also grown over the past year. We have over 180,000 forms submitted to the Office Production Eforms within the Document Libraries part of our InfoPath site:

    So our Document Libraries looks like this :

    Now for the problem:

    As we try to edit an existing form Template (ie. Add a field, change something, whatever), we get the following error when we try to publish the form:

    INFOPATH HAS ENCOUNTERED AN ERROR. THE OPERATION FAILED. THE PARAMETER IS INCORRECT

    Once we get this error, the form we were trying to change becomes useless. We can no longer edit in browser, the form is broken. Our only way out is to edit the form in InfoPath and save it as a new name, and then publish it as a new form. As a side note, we can create new forms all day long without any problems, but if we try to edit one, forget it.

    Thanks

  2. In short, make sure that your environment has all of the latest patches on it. The longer answer is that you shouldn’t hae 180K forms in a library unless you’ve got them moved into folders — and even then it’s worth considering other strategies.

    There are some issues with the web service API that InfoPath uses. It results in some situations where InfoPath gets and error it doesn’t know how to handle. I’ve not seen your specific issue, but I do know it can happen.

    If it only happens in the large library it’s probably a timeout issue. That *MAY* get logged in the ULS logs. It’s worth taking a quick look to see if there’s anything there.

  3. Hi Folks,

    I am new to MOSS 2007 & Infopath-2007. I am getting “updating the content type failed ” error during publishing form onto Document Library (not as Content Type). Last week, i published form successfully, but suddenly it is failing. :(

    I am publishing with Domain Trust, no certification is sign (actually, not required in my case) and tried many below URL but again i failed.

    URL (http://server/ or
    http://server/sites/ThatSite/ or
    http://server/sites/ThatSite/FormLib/Forms/AllItems.aspx

    Thereafter, I tried creating new template with single button/textbox, but it gives same error.

    Today, i tried with blank form, it failed again with same error.

    doing Googling, i only got 2 solution – timeout or too many columns added from infopath. However, in my case there are only 3-4 columns i want to publish.

    I tried below links, but no help:

    http://www.sharepoint-tips.com/2007/02/publishing-infopath-to-sharepoint.htmland many other links too but i didn’t find any solution. Please advice.

    If any body can give me precise solution, then it would be appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Chintan

  4. thanks, you save me a lot of time!

  5. Thank you this worked.


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