Programmatically update InfoPath form Content Type to open in browser

If you are deploying an InfoPath form to your site as a feature then it is highly likely your form will be installed as a content type. By default however the form will try to open in the InfoPath client if there is one installed on the machine.

You could of course go into the list settings and change this so that new instances open in the browser but this is pain if you are trying to create an automated install/deploy process.

So how can I do this programmatically I hear you ask??

Well it turns out that the SPContentType class has a property called RequireClientRenderingOnNew. This is a boolean value which is by default set to ‘true’.

See the below code snippet on how to change this –

   1: SPContentType cType = web.ContentTypes["My ContentType"];

   2: cType.RequireClientRenderingOnNew = false;

   3: //Update the content type

   4: cType.Update();

The best place to perform this change would probably be in a ‘featurereceiver’.

Hope this helps 🙂

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Opening InfoPath form in SharePoint ‘Requested registry access is not allowed’

This is another gotcha that I’ve run into today – when I went to publish an InfoPath form to my SharePoint site I spotted an error in the design checker ‘Invalid Form Template’. I ignored the error and carried on but when I tried to create a new form based on the template in the document library, I received the following error –

Requested registry access is not allowed. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowSecurityException(ExceptionResource resource) at Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey.OpenSubKey(String name, Boolean writable) at Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey.OpenSubKey(String name) at Microsoft.Win32.Registry.GetValue(String keyName, String valueName, Object defaultValue) at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Runtime.FormServer.<>c__DisplayClass1.b__0

I did some research and came accross this blog post from Joel Oleson (@joeloleson) which helped me fix the problem –

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/01/02/evaluation-version-expired-but-not-really.aspx

The steps I took to fix the error were slightly different from Joel’s (see below) but his blog post helped to point out the registry keys on which the access was failing.

The application pool account for my SharePoint web application was running as ‘Network Service’, I did try and add this account to the ‘Distributed Com Users’ group but this did not fix the problem.

Initially I changed the application pool account for the web application to a domain account and this fixed the problem, then I changed it back to Network Service and gave that built in account read permission on the registry key –

‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Office Server\12.0’

and that also worked! So there are two options in case anyone runs into the same problem.

Hope this helps 🙂

I must remember this when publishing InfoPath forms

When publishing InfoPath forms to SharePoint ensure that the site you are publishing to has a top level ‘root’ site. E.g. If you are publishing to a virtual path such as “/sites/” and there is no site on the “/” path then the wizard will fail with a ‘URL is not valid’ error!