Managing form changes over time?

[blackhawk]

I am looking for some best practices for handling changes to forms that are
published to sharepoint.

Basically, this form is destined to change over time, and the lifetime of
this form is probably 10 years, which means that we could see a lot of
completed forms saved in sharepoint that would need to be updated as the
forms change.

The question I have, is are there any best practices for handling changes to
the schema of a sharepoint published form and getting the older ones to
follow with those changes?

 

[Bob C.]

One thought (that I have implemeted) is to make the form use a repeating
section that can hold many types of information in it's structure. For
example, instead of createing three fields for DateOfBirth, Hair Color, and
Height, create a repeating section with fields named dataCategory, dataCode,
and dataValue. Then you insert three rows for each of the three:

DataCategory, dataCode, dataValue
======================
PersonalInfo, DateOfBirth, "4/1/99"
PersonalInfo, Hair Color, "Blue"
PersonalInfo, Height, "7'10"

This way the info you collect over time can expand without necessitating
chage to the form.

/bac

 

[Kalyan G Reddy MVP (GGK Tech)]

Hello

You can try using this product
http://www.qdabra.com/proddetail.asp?prod=QDBXL1

I hope it will help you.

 

[David Dean]

Check the following section in the InfoPath SDK documentation.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb251002.aspx

One key thing to examine is the use of upgrade.xsl to automatically upgrade
forms saved using an older XML schema to a newer schema format. In general,
you can add to an existing schema without problems, but changing node names
or structure can introduce complications.