Applies To: SharePoint 2010, InfoPath 2010

Many of you are probably aware that you can replace the standard list item forms with InfoPath browser based forms (SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise only), and if you weren’t, you are now. It’s as simple as hitting the Customize Form button on the List tab of the List Tools ribbon:

By default the same form is used for all three views (New, Edit, & Display). You can create new views in InfoPath (Page Design tab -> New View) and then back in SharePoint use the Form Web Parts dropdown shown above to customize the InfoPath Form Web Part to show the view you want. There are other guides out there to getting this done that go into more detail, but that’s the gist of it.

I ran into an interesting problem the other day when using this feature. I had a form view for New, Edit & Display and everything was working great. Then I realized that I had some optional fields that I didn’t want to show on the display form if they were blank.

So I wrapped those up in a section and slapped a formatting rule to “Hide this control”:

Boom! I published the form and everything displayed as expected. I did a bunch of other stuff and then went back to add another item to the list. Suddenly the form view I was using for the New List Item was completely Read-only. Obviously, that’s a problem.

I opened the form back up in InfoPath and made sure the View Properties didn’t have the Read-only checkbox checked – Nope. I cried a little but then through the blur of my tears I noticed that every field on every view that wasn’t in one of my auto hide sections had a little blue info icon. Hovering over the icon showed FieldName (Control bound to missing field or group). What a heck?

Meanwhile the Edit form is still working great. So I right-clicked on the fields choose Change Binding and verified they were all hooked up correctly. Some searching brought me to this TechNet thread. The answer is in there but it wasn’t super obvious to me.

Basically, by adding the sections I had caused all the other fields on all the views to be outside the SharePointListItems_RW section and this breaks their binding. So how do you fix it? It’s actually pretty simple.

Right-click on any of your Optional Sections and choose Section Properties from the context menu. In the Default settings section of the Data tab is a radio button. Switch it from Do not include the section in the form by default to Include the section in the form by default. Click OK.

Suddenly all the little blue info icons go away and every Optional Section is now called Section. Re-Publish your form and you’ll find the auto-hiding still works perfectly and your New Item form is no longer Read-only. See? It can’t rain all the time sunshine!