Here’s something that I hope to save a few hours to you – InfoPath Forms Services.
I recently ran into this dreaded error – “InfoPath
Forms Services is not turned on” when trying to configure it from within SharePoint
Central Administration -> General Application Settings.
Forms Services is part of SharePoint Enterprise Services (usually
activated via a Farm/Web Application/Site Collection or Site feature) and it relies
upon the State Service.
So on our intranet, we’re revamping some InfoPath forms that were working in SP2007
and a new SP2010 using the database detach/attach method saw the intranet up and runningalmostexcept
for this InfoPath Forms Services.
Most posts on the web talk about simply not having the feature enabled for either
a Site collection, and/or Central Admin (and various other red herrings in my case)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1237956/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on
http://mundeep.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on/
Basically my source of truth was SharePoint Manager 2010 (great tool
from CODEPLEX) which allows
connections to SharePoint via the APIs as a standalone application (tip: make sure
you launch it in ’run in administrator’ mode).
From here I saw that on my install I was missing Forms Services listed
in the Farm’s Service Applications
I initially thought it was some permissions issue and that I couldn’t see the service
under that account (even though I was farm admin), so I launched and checked under
the installer account and got the same result.
My next questions were: How does Forms Services become missing? How do you
manually install/enable it?
In this case, I had a classroom SharePoint 2010 VM easily available and looking at
it through SharePoint Manager, low and behold the Forms Service service
was there!! Listed.
The machine I was having trouble with was a standard clean install, that I didn’t automatically
run the Configuration Wizard on – as I wanted to have control over
the naming of DBs. That was pretty much the difference between the two machines.
So I tried a few things:
a) installing just the InfoPath Web Admin Feature – stsadm -o installfeature
-name IPFSAdminWeb -force and then activating it with stsadm -o activatefeature
-name IPFSAdminWeb -url http://sp2010:10000 -force (no
luck, it just gave me the InfoPath config under the Central Admin)
b) reran the configuration wizard
c) repaired setup
d) tried to run just the InfoPath Forms Services MSI from the install source.
all to no avail.
InfoPath Forms Services – now with ’deeper’ integration with SharePoint
2010, an internal service but with no real apparent way of getting to it.
The Answer:
I got thinking and I decided to attempt a backup of the Service from my VM
and restore just the Service to the intranet Farm.
– Perform a backup of just the configuration
Then from there I did a restore (more in hope than anything) such that this process
would ’inject’ the right settings into the Farm Database.
At this point anything with InfoPath Forms Services on it was a bonus.
In any rate, here’s the backup file in ZIP format from my VM, that you can use to
restore if ever faced with a similar challenge 🙂
InfoPathFormsServices.ZIP