2/10/2011

InfoPath 2010: "The following url is not valid"

 

There are bugs, and then there are DUMB bugs!

 

When you try to publish an InfoPath 2010 form to SharePoint, InfoPath may display this error: “The following url is not valid”, even if the URL is valid. The cause?  This Microsoft article says its because InfoPath ignores your URL and instead checks to see if there is a root level site collection. In other words, if you entered http://yourserver/sites/site1, InfoPath checks to see if http://yourserver is a valid site collection. There’s no “rule” that says you must have a root level site collection in SharePoint.

The fix, according to Microsoft… create a root site collection! 

 

DUMB!

 

Did it work? Yes, and the odd thing is I created a site collection without granting the users access permissions and InfoPath was now happy in spite of permissions.

 

For more info see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981854

 

 

And while talking about DUMB bugs…

How about this one… try to publish from InfoPath to a server that requires authentication… you get a popup for the username and password with a popup about “Getting site content types”.  You can’t authenticate without cancelling the “getting” of content types. You can’t get content types without authenticating.

DUMB!

Actually this is dumb, but unlikely. In this example the user was in the Member group, but was not a site owner. The first time the wizard asked for credentials it was to confirm that the site existed. The second time was because the user did not have rights to publish. Still… it’s a dumb bug.

 

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7 comments:

Unknown said...

I also discovered that if you create a custom document information panel for Office in InfoPath 2010, Office 2007 does not like the DIP, even if you save it in compatibility mode.

Muhammad Fahad said...

In my case, I already have the site at root level and still I'm getting this stupid error. I don't know what else I'm supposed to do?
FYI: I also verified path(/) under my web app, its already used that is why i get an error when i try to add path(/): Cannot add the managed patch "/" because its name is the same as an existing one.

vorw9133 said...

Muhammad, I was running into this issue but only in my test SharePoint environment. I think this was caused because SSL was not configured for my test site yet the checkbox requiring SSL auth under General Application Settings > Configure InfoPath Forms Services was checked. Make sure this setting matches your SharePoint environment. This may not be the cause for your issue but I figured I'd post it if you weren't able to figure any thing else out.

Criket79 said...

I think I may have found more to this issue if anyone can help. I have a root site collection, but am using a series of manged paths. There's two primary levels of managed paths in the farm. First level is similar to /department, next level is the department name; /department/hr. Each department will have multiple site collections. Received this error for InfoPath when publishing to one of the departments. I thought it could have been because I didn't have a SC at the /deparment level so I created one. I was able to publish at the /department level site collection, but still not able at the /department/hr level. Seems to me that this error is more presistant past the root. Have you seen this? Ideas on how to get past?

Mike Smith said...

Criket79,

You may want to post your question to the MSDN forums and see if you can get a response from one of the InfoPath experts there.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010customization/threads

Mike

Paul P said...

That bug is really eerie and was driving me crazy, indeed.
Thank you so much for the solution!

jonathan reininger said...

I got this same error but I setup a SSL/443 binding using a wildcard self-signed SSL card for my SP2010 site.

My site was created by the wizard upon setup. I changed my router to send http/80 to this site and like magic Infopath2007 would publish fine.

SO if your using a wildcard (ie *.blogger.com) SSL you might get this error too.

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