Absolute beginner. Fell in the deep end

Question

I have been tasked with maintaining and upgrading an infopath form that my predecessor created. I have absolutely 0 background on this particular form and he had no documentation as to where this form/DB/sharepoint site may be located. Making this more fun, I have no infopath/sharepoint experience. He was pretty good at automating things in databases and such so I feel this rabbit hole may go pretty deep.

Here is what I do know:

Every individual that uses this form has a local copy. The local copy opens and is filled out in infopath. Not Sharepoint or a Sharepoint site. As it is designed the form is filled out by the user and when the submit button is clicked it is sent out to an email distro with the form copied in as an attachment.

At this point I need to add a check box to the form and send out a new copy to all users. I cannot get the local copy I have to open in infopath in anything other than read only. Am I going about this wrong? In Access if I hit ALT-F11 I can open the debugger and view back-end code. I have not found an equivalent in infopath to allow me to track out where this form is connecting to. I feel certain based on things I have found in other projects my predecessor was maintaining there is a back end where the data is being stored. Though I could be wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I believe you'll find the InfoPath template you're looking for in the site's Forms library. It'll be generically named as Template [number]. Open that Template and save a copy with a descriptive name in a different SharePoint library. Edit the descriptive file and publish to server. The edited form will be saved as Template [number] in the Forms library AND will also be saved under the descriptive file. Thereafter, open the descriptive file to make edits and publish.

To get up to speed quickly on InfoPath, check out the InfoPath video course on Lynda.com. It's fast, excellent and the cost for Lynda may be free if your local library has a subscription. You can also view some InfoPath tutorials to see how you like them. Good luck!