I had a form in production that a client was using to track requests for items that required justification. During testing, we noticed that once the form was submitted, the rich-text field in InfoPath displayed as a Single Line of Text field in SharePoint but the client was sure that all justifications would be short. Famous last words. Several users wrote novels and when (oops!) we added an approval to the request directly in SharePoint, we lost all but the first 255 characters of the novel!
The solution didn't help us retrieve the lost novels/justifications, but we were able to figure out how to get all the information to map to a rich text field in SharePoint, even if the approach requires several steps. The solution is the following:
After you publish the form to SharePoint the first time, go to the SharePoint list and create a new column with a type of Multiple Lines of Text. If you think people will be writing a lot of text in the field, be sure to select the "allow unlimited length in document libraries" button.
Then, go in to the InfoPath form and in the publishing wizard where you choose which fields to promote to SharePoint, highlight your source field and hit Modify. Then, map your source field in InfoPath to your newly created multi-line text field in SharePoint and all the characters typed in by the user will transfer to SharePoint and you won't lose them (even if you may want to!).
If users do write lots and lots of text in the form field, your SharePoint views will not be pretty, but all of the information will be visible. Fortunately, we only had a few cases where we'd edited the form data from SharePoint and the user wrote lengthy justifications so the impact was not devastating.
It took me several attempts at crafting a Google search to resolve this issue so I hope this helps someone else (or gets someone to identify a better way).
Hanley is an independent consultant and president of her own firm, Susan Hanley LLC, where she specializes in the design and development of portal solutions and knowledge management consulting.
She is co-author of Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration. Read a free chapter of the book.
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Great post!
Susan, thanks for the timely post - I am working on a similar issue with InfoPath and this post came just in time!
Just what I needed
Hi Susan...
I found your post after just a quick search. I haven't performed your tip but I am confident it will work for me. I just implemented a new form and I am a newbie to InfoPath much less connecting it to SharePoint but I was able to create a basic solution for our team.
Your post is just in time!!!
Thanks so much!
B
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